[Commons-Law] Terrible State of Indian Patent Office Publications...

[Hasit seth]

No Way to Access Issed Patents Online
==============================  
  Indian patent office publications are in a terrible state of
affairs.  There is no online access to sealed (issued) patents.  Only
from January 2005, the Indian Patent Office publishes a "Journal of
the Patent Office"
http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/patent/journal_archieve/patent_journal_2005.htm
which is supposed to provide publications after 18 months of filings
and other details.  However, the Journal merely prints the numbers of
the sealed patents, and nowhere on the site can you find sealed
patents.  This is pretty bad given that the annual publications of are
also not online.  So how does public access the patents? No way to do
it electronically.  The above weekly journal is a mass of badly
scanned paper PDF files with no searching facility since its all
images.  This is quite similar to the state of "official" law reports,
which run so late that nobody bothers to read or cite them.

    Another source was http://www.indianpatents.org.in/  which is run
by governments Technology Forecast and Information Center (TIFAC). 
They publish only CD-ROMS of "Applications" but not actual patents. 
The government probably thinks that patents have only archival value
and hence why bother to publish them online.  In general, I have found
government websites to be terrible in design and function.  There is
no standardization and most just are converted paper brochures with
smiling faces of ministers on them.  For example, the Lok Sabha (lower
house of parliament) website doesn't provide access to bills and is
severely old.  The problem probably lies with the National Informatics
Center, whatever they have done as an in house computer department is
usually bad.  Other government systems, notably the Crisil run
(originally designed and built by a government company CMC, now a part
of TCS) is a fantastic achievement.  This is not a question of lack of
resources since online publication isn't dependent on print-run
economics, but simply the general lack of concern and accountablity in
government inspite of vastly overstaffed army of government servants.

    I believe it is a ripe time to ask for a fundamental right to
electronic information to all non-sensitive government information
with in-built provision for timely updates.

Regards,
Hasit