The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) will make the full-text of 2 million patents dating back to 1976 and the text and images of 800,000 trademarks and 300,000 pending registrations from the late 1800s to the present, available free of charge to the public on the Web. The file will consist of more than 20 million pages. Keyword searching will be available.
Trademark text is already available, with trademark images and patent text to follow in November. Patent images that correlate to the text will be available online free by March, 1999. Users will be ātIč cVprint the images at screen resolu-tion at no cost using a normal browser print function. Users will also be able to order high quality copies online for electronic delivery.
There are plans to extend the patent coverage back to the very beginning of the PTO, but it may take several years.
[Contact: PTO at www.uspto.gov].