Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
While there’s been no shortage of interesting developments, reporting on each one often seems redundant with the efforts of many other worthy sites (IPWatchdog, Patently-O, etc.). That, coupled with a heavy workload, has made regular posts a rather low priority.
For all that, people on occasion ask me what I’ve been up to outside legal work, so I thought I’d offer a quick sample. Much of late 2017 outside work was consumed with my portfolio viewer. If you want to quickly assess the state of someone’s patent portfolio, the available public tools can be a little tedious. First, you’ll search Google Patents or PATFT for the applicant / assignee. Then you’ll plod through each listing one by one, maintaining a spreadsheet to track all your findings. It’s tedious. It’s non-visual. All-in-all it’s a bit silly.
So I wrote a viewer. For example, here’s the Broad Institute’s portfolio (or at least some CRISPR bits of it).
D3.js is a beautiful thing. In the top-left, you have the families organized into a circle diagram. So here, with a glance, you can see there are four major families and then bunches of one-off filings. Light blue is a pending (or abandoned) app, dark blue is an issued app. When you click on a family, the tree-view shows the member relationships. In the right, a thumbnail preview is provided – clicking on a page opens a PDF on that page.
If there’s enough interest I’ll post an online demo, but it’ll have to be for a much smaller dataset than Broad’s IP. Even with reduced preview images, I think this thing was around 1.5GB (the typical website is ~2-5MB). There’s a reason Google Patent only shows a handful of assets and images at a time.
Also, if you’re an attorney and want me to generate a dataset for you, that’s fine, but you’ll probably want to use it locally for the same reason.
I have other projects, but this is the most visually satisfying IMO.