Into The Light – Australian Patent Documents Come Out Of The Dark

With the proliferation of patents and licences with overlapping and competing rights, the ability to interpret and filter patent documents has never been more important. Recently, Australian start-up CAMBIA has improved access to patent texts by creating "Patent Lens" an open source, freely accessible IP database that contains a large collection of patent documents from the European Patent Office (EPO), the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

Patent Lens enables searching of the full text of patent documents from the EPO, the USPTO and the WIPO to be performed. Any documents of interest can then be viewed and printed at no cost. Most recently, the full text of over 115,000 Australian granted patents and over 580,000 pending Australian patent applications were added to the Patent Lens collection of almost 7 million patent documents. The Patent Lens database currently includes the data listed in the table below: