It's time to update the MMD archives with regard to Internet patent
searches.  First, the free IBM site has been taken over by Delphion,
and the search service is no longer free.  A year ago, I was able
to find something called "Basic" service at the Delphion site which
permitted simple searches and viewing at no charge, but I can no longer
find the link.

On the other hand, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO) has an excellent data base and search engine, which, as
Beatrice Robertson pointed out in MMD 2001.08.25, has images of patents
from 1790 through the present.

Full-text searches can be performed on patents issued after 1975; this
feature allows you to look for such things as Inventor, Assignee, and
keywords from the patent Abstract.  As an example, if you type in
"AN/Yamaha AND ABST/keyboard" you will get a list (1976 through present)
of all patents owned by Yamaha which mention "keyboard" in the summary
Abstract.

Text searches are not available on patents prior to 1976, but TIFF
images of all the patents (1790 through present) are available if you
know the patent number.  One technique for determining a patent number
where the text search is not available is to follow the links of
"References Cited"; listed here, in all U.S. patents, are the prior
art patents which have laid the foundation for the new invention.

With patience, you can look up each of the cited patents, and obtain a
specific list of References Cited on each of the patents.  In this way
you can build a very comprehensive tree of patent numbers of related
prior art.

For example, I looked up Ken Caulkins' patent for a "Musical Instrument
Pneumatic Actuator" (U.S. 4,619,177).  Since this was issued in 1985,
a text search (IN/Caulkins) quickly located this patent.  What's really
valuable here is on the first page: a list of the U.S. Patent Documents
cited as prior art; in the Caulkins patent, the references go back to
1909!  Of interest to me was the Gulbransen patent (U.S. 1,681,338)
which was issued in 1928.  With this patent number available, I was
able to immediately pull up the complete text and figures of the
Gulbransen patent.

The USPTO has recently added a link to a free TIFF viewer (named
"AlternaTIFF", and apparently developed for medical-image viewing)
which does an excellent job.  It permits viewing an entire page on the
screen, or a pan/zoom of the page image at maximum USPTO resolution
(300 dpi).  Prints invoked from the TIFF viewer are of excellent
quality, too.

Installing the TIFF viewer took about 5 minutes; the download is
a ZIPped file of 170 kB, and it is immediately available to Internet
Explorer (and also Netscape) when its installation file has been
executed.

Here are the URLs of interest.

  USPTO search home page:  http://www.uspto.gov/patft/
  USPTO image retrieval instruction page:
    http://www.uspto.gov/patft/images.htm
  AlternaTIFF web site:  http://www.alternatiff.com/

John Rhodes
Vancouver, WA