Industrial Property Digital Library

» see ipdl.inpit.go.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 31 March 1999 the Japan Patent Office put its publication archive on the web and let anyone query it. 特許電子図書館, the Industrial Property Digital Library, covered patents and utility models alongside designs and trademarks, running back to the Meiji era. It was free, it required no registration, and it was reachable from outside Japan. In 1999 that combination was close to unheard of for a national patent register.

The JPO ran it directly until 30 September 2004, then handed it to INPIT, the National Center for Industrial Property Information and Training, on 1 October. The hostname moved with the handover and again in March 2007, so a service that never changed its name worked its way through three addresses.

From where I sit it was reachable and mostly unreadable. The interface and the documents were Japanese, so for an engineer outside Japan the practical ceiling was whatever machine translation could do with a patent claim, and for most of IPDL's life that was not much. What crosses the language barrier intact is the decision underneath it: a government concluded that the public record of what had been invented should cost nothing to search and should not require you to identify yourself, and then it held that line for sixteen years.

~ the record ~

~ ninety eight million ~

IPDL's own help page carried a running count, and the Internet Archive caught it often enough to plot the curve. 55.5 million documents in April 2007, 71 million in April 2010, 84 million in January 2013, and 98 million two months before the end. The English Wikipedia article still quotes the 2007 figure, which understates the service by nearly half.

INPIT's performance report for the 2014 financial year puts searches at roughly 107.7 million against a target of 80 million, or 135 percent of what the agency had promised. That was the final full year of operation. The help desk answered Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 21:00, and the thing was busiest in the year it was killed.

~ abolished, not renamed ~

J-PlatPat went live on Monday 23 March 2015, three days after IPDL stopped. A three-day gap between a service ending and a near-identical one starting is exactly what a rebrand looks like, so the question has to be settled with the agency's own words rather than the timeline. INPIT's accounts settle it: 同日で特許電子図書館（IPDL）事業は廃止となった. That same day the Industrial Property Digital Library business was abolished. 廃止 is the term reserved for a terminated program, not a renamed one.

The abolition had been ordered by a Cabinet decision of 7 December 2010 reviewing the work of the independent administrative agencies, which means it was scheduled more than four years ahead of the switch-off. The JPO published the warning on 1 September 2014, six and a half months out. What arrived on the Monday was a new name on a new host running new software behind a new interface.

It was also not feature-for-feature, and the JPO says so itself: Patent Map Guidance, which IPDL had provided, was discontinued rather than ported. The FI and F-term classification handbooks that examiners and agents worked from ended up dumped as raw TAR archives in April 2015, after users complained that the thing they relied on had simply stopped existing. IPDL's beginner-oriented search front, which carried its own line on INPIT's usage chart, did not come across either.

~ fifteen seconds ~

What stood at the old address afterward was a Shift-JIS page under a meta refresh. "特許電子図書館(IPDL)は、サービスを終了いたしました。永らくのご利用、ありがとうございました。" The Industrial Property Digital Library has ended its service, thank you for your long patronage. Then the new URL, then a note that you would be moved along in fifteen seconds, and then the last instruction a sixteen-year-old public service gave its users: if you have the IPDL top page saved in your favorites or bookmarks, please change the registered URL. Both of its hostnames stopped resolving some time after that.

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