By Donald Zuhn --
Patents Online, LLC, the company behind FreePatentsOnline, today announced the release of a companion online service, SumoBrain. The service, which was launched this summer, offers an alternative to patent search pay services by providing free cross-collection searching, portfolios, saved search capabilities, alerts, bulk PDF download capabilities, and collaboration tools. According to the company's release, SumoBrain was initially conceived as a subscription service, but Patents Online decided to make the service completely free. Patents Online CEO Erik Reeves noted that the FreePatentsOnline database, from which SumoBrain will draw its search results, currently includes 8,812,656 patents. SumoBrain permits full-text searching of U.S. patents (1976-present), published U.S. applications (2001-present), European patents and published European applications (1991-present), PCT publications (1978-present), and English abstracts of Japanese patent applications (1996-present). PDFs can be obtained for U.S. patents (1790-present), published U.S. applications (2001-present), European patents and published European applications (1978-present), and PCT publications (1978-present).
FreePatentsOnline is one of my favorite patent searching tools so I had high hopes for the SumoBrain service. My initial reaction was quite favorable since SumoBrain seemed like a somewhat beefed up version of FreePatents. The ability to download 50 PDFs at a time and an improved patent portfolio system were nice additions.
Unfortunately, the fatal flaw of this service is that you are limited to downloading 50 PDFs per day. After downloading your daily allotment of PDFs you aren’t even able to view patent PDFs one at a time. While it is understandable that there is a daily limit to mass downloading, including individual PDF downloads in that number makes this service practically useless when doing a prior art search.
Posted by: Brian L. | October 14, 2008 at 09:33 AM