US Patent Office Teams With Google On Database 82
PatPending writes "The Patent and Trademark Office announced it has reached a two-year 'no-cost' agreement with Google to make patent and trademark data electronically available and free to the public. From the article: 'Saying it lacks the technical capacity to offer such a service, PTO said the two-year agreement with Google is a temporary solution while the agency seeks a contractor to build a database that would allow the public to access such information in electronic machine-readable bulk form.'"
Don't you know that contractors are always better? (Score:5, Informative)
You don't understand how government IT works these days.
Most government IT shops in the U.S. have not yet recovered from the election of Bush the Younger. When he came into office, the overall attitude of the new guys in charge was that they hated government, hated government workers, and believed that it was a God-given truth that all government workers are incompetent at all things they do. Thus, anything that could be contracted out must be contracted out. Internal IT got downsized, outsourced, demoralized, broken, and spat on in many, many places.
Just as an aside, this idiocy reached such insane heights that high-level executives at one government agency [irs.gov] actually floated a plan to do away with internal local IT support and replace it, where feasible, with something called "depot maintenance." Reduced to nuts and bolts, they actually considered contracting with Best Buy for certain instances of in-the-field deskside support! This made perfect sense to the bigwigs. After all, Best Buy is private industry so they must be more competent than anyone who actually works for the agency, right?
That attitude crippled many agencies and most have yet to recover. Even if Google built the system and handed it over with a ribbon around it, it's likely that the executives at USPTO would go looking for a contractor to charge lots of money to run the thing. (Disclaimer: I'm not there; I'm just speaking from broad experience with multiple agencies. I hope somone from USPTO will chime in.)
It's just part of the culture. I know it seems bad, but eventually people will wake up to the fact that if you keep electing people who believe that all government is bad, the result is going to be...well...bad government. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, doncha know.
Re:Don't you know that contractors are always bett (Score:4, Informative)
I was a federal IT employee during the time when all this outsourcing got going, there should still be paperwork with my signature contracting out jobs, I read all the paperwork on doing it and everything else and it start and was organized by ex-President Clinton. All the studies, reports, and decisions continued in the Bush administration came from Clinton.
The main reason Clinton gave for outsourcing everything had the main points of being cheaper, being able to get the job done(not able to hire enough federal employees and flexibility of not being locked in with the federal employees and the loss of new skills that gave.
Now all this new insourcing the reports and analysis they are using are all coming from studies ordered during the Bush administration, except they are ignoring the warning given in the reports and just told people to insource. This is now leading to people building up empires and it is now costing more then the proposed cost saving. You did have President Bush allowing more experimentation to see if some positions would save money and generate similar results some worked out and others were failures and insourced.
Re:Patenting code. (Score:1, Informative)
Except mathematical algorithms aren't supposed to be patentable.