Public PAIR: The Newest Tool to Monitor the Filing and Prosecution of Competitor Patents.

Mondaq Business Briefing, October, 2004

Originally published September 2004

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced a new electronic database as part of its effort to make the patent examination process fully transparent to the public. The new database, known as the Public PAIR (Patent Application and Information Retrieval) system, allows anyone with Internet access to track the status of a public patent application as it moves from publication to final disposition. Public PAIR allows the public to view, download, and print an array of information including PDF files of all the documents contained in approximately 500,000 patent application files not covered by confidentiality laws. The types of documents available for viewing include Office Actions, Amendments, Information...