Barry Fox

In another life I watch for interesting new patents. Most of the several thousand new filings every week are very strange (a walking stick made from discarded orange juice bottles), deadly dull (subtle changes to fuel injection engines) or written in Martian (biotech gene mapping).

But a few reveal fascinating facts. For instance, patent law insists that only true inventors can be named as the inventor. If the declaration is wrong, the patent can be lost.

Time Warner has a valuable pile of highly technical patents in many countries covering key features of the DVD system (eg WO9512275 and US6424794).

Many of these name Warren Lieberfarb as the joint inventor. This is a real surprise because, although it was Lieberfarb who almost single-handedly persuaded the world to adopt DVD, he never came across as a techie.

A few years ago Israeli company Midbar filed patents on a CD copy protection system that replaces some of the music code with false data.

If the CD is copied the false data may be incorrectly labelled as music. The player cannot decode the garbage and may feed distortion noise to the speakers.

The effect, said Midbar, is "potentially damaging" to the player's circuitry. Midbar later insisted that it had no intention of using the system.

The company has now been bought by rival Macrovision, but the patent sits on library shelves and in cyberspace.

So does a new Japanese filing from Sony in Tokyo (03/063154). A music CD is pressed with the centre hole deliberately off-centre and the label side has asymmetric markings printed with heavy paint.

This shifts the centre of gravity, which does not matter when the disc is played at normal speed in a consumer music CD player, but a high-speed PC drive finds it "impossible to maintain stable rotation".

The disc drive behaves like an unbalanced washing machine and the PC cannot make a copy.

In theory anyone can read these patents by going to a patent library or accessing one of several online patent office sites.

Remember that the whole point of a patent is that it is bargain between inventor and state. In return for the chance of a limited-life legal monopoly (usually 20 years) the inventor must disclose details of how the invention works.

If the patent application fails, the details remain on public view. The same happens when the patent expires and the monopoly ends.

Some sensitive patents are kept secret and only published when their security risk has evaporated (the atom bomb and bouncing bomb patents were published decades late) and I know of only one case where patents were unpublished.

It happened when the UK government goofed and released full details of nerve gases and how to make them. After a few days the documents were recalled. But by then the lethal recipes were all round the world.

Some patent libraries (the British Library, for instance) still hold patents on paper, as well as microfilm and CD. But it's clear that, within a couple of years, the only way to access this information will be online.

So it is obviously essential that it is easy to find. But even professional librarians tear their hair out at the lack of consistency and logic between the different patent office services.

The European Patent Office in Munich has a search site called Espacenet. Numbers must be entered as a continuous string without spaces.

So, although the new Sony patent is printed with the number WO 03/063154 it must entered as WO03063154. The leading zero is essential; entering WO0363154 earns the error message: "No or too many operators, erroneous set of parenthesis, syntax error."

Perversely, the Wipo (World Intellectual Property Organisation) site in Geneva has several search sites that find nothing with WO03063154. The Wipo sites need a completely different entry format, WO/03/063154. One Wipo search site needs leading zeros. Another does not.

The EPO and Wipo sites store patents as text or pdf image files. The pdfs can only be downloaded, viewed with Acrobat and printed one page at a time.

Expensive software is needed to handle whole documents. The mouse scroll wheel works when a PCT patent is displayed as text, but not for pdfs.

The US Patent Office is different again. US application number 2003/0084448 must be entered as 20030084448. Document images are stored as tiffs with ITU T.6 or CCITT Group 4 (G4) compression.

Says the USPO cheerfully: "Relatively few image viewers and plug-ins handle G4 compression." It costs $50 to download full reader software.

Conspiracy theorists maintain that the world's patent offices are in league to create trade for the commercial search services, which charge high prices for search access through their own easier-to-use sites.

Cock-up theorists, and I'm one of them, reckon the world's patent offices are run by highly paid VIPs who have never rolled up their sleeves and searched for patents.

They delegate site design and search protocol to software engineers who do not use patents either. The EPO, Wipo and USPO bosses were too arrogant or ignorant to talk to each other about matching systems.

They should be ashamed of themselves. But I very much doubt that they are.

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