Fun_People Archive
7 Jan
Trademarking your tax dollars

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed,  7 Jan 98 15:34:03 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: Trademarking your tax dollars

[The PTO is the Patent & Trademarks Office.  -psl]

Forwarded-by: "pardo@cs.washington.edu" <pardo@cs.washington.edu>
Forwarded-by: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)

!19980105  PTO blows $860,000 licensing search engine for trademarks

    In yet another act of contempt for the public, the PTO is spending
$860,000 to license a search engine for trademark data from Dataware
Technologies (the company whose search engine the PTO refuses to stop using
on the CASSIS CDROMs, which if the PTO did, would allow the public to freely
make copies of the CDROMs to pass around to inventors and students, and
allow the PTDLs to distribute old copies of CASSIS CDROMs to local schools).
$860,000 to search through a few gigabytes of data.

    The software search engine is being installed on a HP server to help
trademark examiners search through the 2,000,000 plus trademark database.
"Its important because it is a site-license agreement [which means] that in
the future any of the PTO offices can be using this application", said
someone from Dataware.  $860,000 for a site-license for a search engine?
The sales staff at Dataware must be laughing its brains out.  The PTDLs have
been trying to get the PTO to dump Dataware for years without any success.

    Look, for $860,000 I could put the full text of all trademark records
onto the Internet that not only can be used by all trademark people at the
PTO, but also by anyone from the public wishing to freely search federal
trademark data (which would help deal with the problem of Internet domain
name registration shenanigans).  PLUS I could throw in access to the full
text of all patents to be searched by both people inside and outside the
PTO.

    So spending $860,000 to license a search engine is a fraudulent thing
to do, done by a PTO that sets incredibly low demands of its contractors
while paying them large amounts of money in light of current state of the
art technology in software and hardware.  When PTO management cries poor,
they are lying.  They seem to have plenty of money to waste on these
automation projects.

    Email the White House.  Email your Congressional representative.
Email the PTO.  Enough voices and this waste and fraud can be stopped.

Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service
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