Summary of Costs of Paper PCT ApplicationsThe following is based upon an email message sent to PIUG on August 25, 1998 by Greg Aharonian, Internet Patent New Service. It is a revised summary of the cost of paper PCT applications (note that Greg advised that most of the prices are the same for EPO patents):
Dialog/SourceOne - $5.00 (1990 to present)
Dialog/SourceOne - $20.00 (upto 1989)
Derwent - $12.00 (1991 to present)
Derwent - $19.50 (upto 1990)
GENERAL OBSERVATIONSDirect Patent and PATENTEC look nice and seem more attune price-wise to the cost of US patents (which are similar in page count and cost similar to obtain the original CDROMs), so assuming no quality problems (one discussed below), they seem the suppliers of choice. MicroPatent's price after including local printing costs are a modest bargain, and other things equivalent for my mostly post-1990 PCTs, Dialog/SourceOne has the better price. Sunmnyvale PTDL is the Northern California Patent and Trademark Depository Library (affiliated with the USPTO). In the case of MicroPatent, to download a PDF file of a PCT application cost $4.95 and then I added $2.00 for local printing an average of 20 pages on a laser printer (at 10 cents a page, which I once saw as the price to print one page on a corporate laser printer to cover the printer, paper, ink maintenance, labor and overhead costs).Speacking of overhead costs, I called the FAXPAT people and apparently the demand for PCTs isn't big for them (to justify buying the PCT CDROMs), so they send someone over to the PTO to manually print them off of the FPAS system. The FPAS system is one of the few neat things available to the public at the PTO in Crystal City. It is a LANed jukebox of CDROMs of full images to most foreign patents, especially PCT/EPO/JPO/GPO/BPO. It is available to the public, costs $0.25 to print a page, and you can select which pages to print (for example, I do studies of the poor quality of software prior art searching done by the PTO and EPO by printing out the front page and search pages of PCT applications). Anyways, if you are in the DC area, and need to print only parts of foreign applications (like abstract and claims), FPAS can be a bargain. All things considered, I would suggest that some of these vendors reconsider their pricing, for example Derwent and the British Library both should be closer to Dialog. And given that the cost of the PCT CDROMs isn't that great (distributed over many customers), I don't know why the pricing for PCTs isn't similar to that of US patents, since statistically I suspect the average length is similar (the only major difference being the length of claims, which will be different in the final issued patent compared to the originally submitted claims in the application as relected in the PCT). For example, why doesn't Dialog charge $8.40 for pre-1990 PCTs? That is, they could order from the British Library at $13.40, and add the $5.00 they charge anyways for post-1990s (you figure out Derwent's $19.50). And for Sunnyvale, stop grossly overcharging small and independent inventors. Last edited: March 2000 / Norman Santora
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