The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is considering proposals for a technology approach to data dissemination that would make publicly available on the Web nearly two petabytes of information maintained by the office. The USPTO is looking for proposals to acquire the data in bulk and make it available to the public at no charge, according to a recent Sources Sought notice amended today on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

This will be the very first time this conference is held in mainland China. We aim to open a forum where different perspectives and expectations meet, communicate and interact, and where the agendas and hopes of the Chinese population are heard, discussed and analyzed on an international scale. The working languages of the conference will be both English and Chinese, and we will provide translation service if necessary. The forms and contradictions in which China tries to conceptualize and materialize modernity, and how the Internet is helping out in this process are the main focus of this conference.

The internet is on the brink of the "biggest change" to its working "since it was invented 40 years ago", the net regulator Icann has said, according to an article by BBC News Technology reporter Jonathan Fildes. Find the article at the link in the headline above.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

Patents are essential to the modern system of innovation. Once produced, information can be transmitted at zero cost. In the absence of patent protection, would-be inventors become vulnerable to competition that would drive the value of their discovery to zero, leaving them with no compensation for the costs of producing that information in the first place. Patent protection allows inventors the benefit of limited competition for a limited time period, giving them an incentive to invest without concern about their innovation's appropriation by others.

A patent granted to Google last week discusses how trust rank might be associated with people who apply labels to web pages through annotations.... The confusion over who came up with the idea of trustrank wasn’t helped by Google trademarking the term “Trustrank” in 2005. That trademark was abandoned by Google on February 29, 2008, according to the records at the USPTO Tess database.

Xyggy Patent finds and ranks US patents based on how similar they are to the query patent(s) using item search rather than text search. This application went live on October 16, 2009.

Now, there's been a lot of interest in "disruption" ever since Clay Christensen did his pathbreaking work on The Innovator's Dilemma, which chronicled how incumbent companies were upended by competitors or substitutes who arose from "lower" markets to create a new cost and demand base. Southwest Airlines did it in air travel, and Wal-Mart in retail. You know the story. So what is the toolkit to create a disruptive design? Here are some ideas in an article by John Sviokla on the Harvard Business Blogs at the link in the headline above.

Companies spend a lot of money to get visible but in today's hyper-connected world, it's increasingly not enough to stand out. As we move to a more social Web, it's becoming more important to replace traditional PR tactics with online conversations.

"Can a free online product ever make money? Yes, absolutely! You simply need to understand the currencies of the Internet and build models that translate the value of those currencies into wealth," says Shelly Palmer in an interesting article at the link above.

Click on the link above to check out IP Think Tank’s weekly selection of top Pharma & Biotech intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and internet.

Click on the link above to see this week's selection of top intellectual property news breaking in the blogosphere and on the internet.

This video has been making the rounds...it contains a lot of information about the social media "revolution". For Bill Pollak, CEO of ALM, the money quote is: "We no longer search for news, the news finds us..."

Craig Johnson was perhaps the most quintessential Silicon Valley startup lawyer. He had an unbridled enthusiasm for new ideas. Just like his entrepreneurial clients, he pushed the boundaries of traditional business models in law practice. And he was always onto the next big thing.

"Pushing law firm content on people is not what social media, or for that matter, the Internet, is all about. By all means have your content (lawyer articles, newsletters, alerts) accessible to be indexed by Google so it may be retrieved on search, but the Internet is about communicating. Communicating does not mean shouting content at people," says Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog. His recent blog post at the link above sparked an interesting conversation among readers in the comments there.

"Ten minutes max. Really. There are no excuses. You can pull out the "too much time" card for getting traction with social media and social networking. But don't try it for "setting up" a Twitter account. Won't fly." Debbie Weil's Insights on Social Media at the link in the headline above.

William Patry’s latest book Moral Panics and The Copyright Wars, reviewed by Brett Trout, a patent attorney who blogs at BlawgIT.