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To: shades who wrote (63136)	5/2/2005 11:39:18 AM
From: Slagle	Respond to of 74559

Shades, Re: IBM. The first effort to make the US Patent library available over the internet, and hence to anyone anywhere was by IBM back in the 1990's (maybe as early as 1997?) with a website called the "IBM Patentserver". I remember reading somewhere that there had been an attempted legal action to force IBM to shut down their website so as to stop foreign eyes for having such easy access to the US patents. I guess the legal action failed. Not long after that (maybe 1998?) the US Patent Office itself began to make US patents viewable at their website. At first to download the patents at the US government website you had to first download some software but I had all sorts of problems getting it to work. IBM's was always browser based but getting good prints of the images was difficult. You could order (and pay for) good copies of the patents from IBM but if you had the time you could download the whole patent, drawings and all for free. Now the Patent office downloads are quick and easy. I've often wondered if these big multinationals are not really just a sort of herd of "Trojan Horses" with a much bigger agenda than just making money. Slagle