By Donald Zuhn --
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today released a summary of the feedback it received in response to its April 30, 2008 webcast concerning user access to the Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. During the webcast, Commissioner for Patents John Doll and Deputy Chief Information Officer Deborah Diaz noted that the Office had implemented a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) tool in order to distinguish human users from automated scripts. Commissioner Doll and Deputy CIO Diaz also requested that PAIR users submit comments concerning their use of the system.
Between April 30 and the June 1 deadline for submitting comments, the USPTO received 37 responses. In summarizing the responses, the Office noted that respondents have "a clear interest in being able to receive automatic notification of status changes or other updates, and some interest in receiving packaged deliveries of data (for example, via DVD or ZIP file)." In addition, the Office stated that "[m]any respondents indicated that their work was impeded without volume access to PAIR data, and at least two reported that they were unable to retrieve data at all under the current access restriction." While the Office concluded that it had "no immediate plans to remove the CAPTCHA restriction" at this time, the Office assured users that it was "evaluating a solution that will ease the restriction and permit limited automated access," and recognized "the urgency in implementing support for both interactive and automated access to Public PAIR."
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