Google to help Patent Office put data online

Engineers at search engine giant Google Inc.’s Cambridge laboratory are working with the US Patent and Trademark Office to make vast amounts of patent information available online for free.

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The Patent Office said yesterday that it has signed a two-year deal with Google to provide bulk downloads of patent and copyright data to the public. Google will provide the service at no charge to the government or to users of the data.

“This is part of a larger effort to make public data, including public statistics and reference data, easier to find, compare, and communicate,’’ said Jon Orwant, engineering manager at Google’s Cambridge lab.

Google has received about 10 terabytes of federal patent and copyright data and is now making it available for download at its Google Books website. Google said that it has no plans to make money from the service by selling advertising on the site, and that it plans to continue providing the data even after its deal with the Patent Office expires.

Andrew Updegrove, a partner with Gesmer Updegrove LLP, an intellectual property firm in Boston, said making the information available free of charge will be a boon to technology companies and independent inventors.

“It makes it easier for people to defend themselves against patent infringement suits,’’ Updegrove said. Companies facing such lawsuits usually try to invalidate the patent by finding an earlier patent that supersedes it. Finding these older patents is costly and time-consuming, but the Google service will make the process much easier.

The Patent Office struck the deal with Google as part of the Obama administration’s effort to increase free electronic access to government documents. It is a stopgap measure to get the data released to the public quickly, while the agency seeks a contractor to build its own data distribution platform to get the documents directly to the public.

The Patent Office already makes individual patent and copyright documents available at its website, and Google offers an online patent search service. But the Patent Office is seeking an easier way to provide access to thousands of patent and copyright documents. Law firms and businesses can use this information to conduct in-depth research. But up to now, the Patent Office has charged high prices for bulk downloads of the data.

The data can be found at www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.