(Sacramento) April 17, 2007 – Today PatentCafe released Version 2.5 of its international patent database and artificial intelligence patent search engine.

Leveraging its V.2.5 patent search technology, PatentCafe also introduced its ProSpectre Patent Search services for law firms and organizations when mitigating invalidity or infringement risk for high investment projects is paramount.

The Patent Reform Bill is slated for introduction to the US House and Senate, possibly within days. The proposed sweeping rule changes could cause the survival rate of poor quality patents to plummet, given the new opportunities to challenge patent validity.

That’s good news for companies tired of being sued for infringement of poor quality patents that should never have issued, but bad news for companies that bank on large portfolios of shoddy patents.

PatentCafe’s V.2.5 patent search tools use powerful artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology to find patent Prior Art that Boolean keyword search engines miss. Aggressive patent searching is a mission-critical capability for creating the highest quality patent applications, and for protecting and enforcing existing patent portfolios.

Using natural language queries, PatentCafe’s V.2.5 engine discovers Prior Art patents based on the MEANING of the search text, even if the most relevant patents do not contain the same keywords in the search query.

CEO Andy Gibbs says “It’s the ONE patent that a researcher DOESN’T find now, but someone else discovers later, that increases the risk to high stakes, high investment research projects. V.2.5 finds important patents that ordinary Boolean search engines miss, mitigating the risk of future infringement or invalidity.”

The new release allows researchers across the enterprise to see more patent data more quickly, to pinpoint potential patent infringement, or to discover Prior Art that could lead to invalidity.

Gibbs adds, “Our tools have proven to deliver unparalleled patent research capability, so we’re now offering our ProSpectre patent search services to organizations not ready to bring our search tools in house.”

Patent Reform is poised to create three early stage validity challenge opportunities, an “open season” for a company to take effective shots at competitor’s patents as a very low cost alternative to litigation.

First, new patent applications may require an accompanying search report. Poorly researched applications may increasingly fail the examination process.

Secondly, a number of initiatives could allow third parties to challenge new applications by submitting Prior Art even before the USPTO examination process begins.

One such initiative, slated for launch next month, is the Peer to Patent Project, supported by Computer Associates, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and others.

Thirdly, a form of Post Grant Opposition is expected to be included in the Patent Reform Act.

Creating a 9 to 12 month opposition window after a patent issues allows third parties to mount low-cost challenges to the validity of the newly granted patent.

PatentCafe’s V.2.5 tools will not only help patent owners survive these challenges, but those same tools will used by opponents to help discover Prior Art that could lead to the invalidity of many poor quality patents in a competitor’s patent portfolio.