The Sunnyvale Sun
News
City takes Sc[i]3 off life support
By JASON GOLDMAN-HALL
For more than a year, the city of Sunnyvale, the Sunnyvale Public Library and a number of residents have fought to find a way to keep the Sunnyvale Center for Innovation, Invention and Ideas--the city's patent and trademark library and training program known as Sc[i]3 --alive.
After funding transfusions, pleas for help and a number of heroic efforts, the battle to save Sc[i]3 ended unsuccessfully on March 28. In the end, it looks as if the rise of the Internet and the popularization of do-it-yourself searches meant the demise of the former hub for Silicon Valley innovation.
On March 28, the city council voted unanimously to end the partnership between the city and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Two weeks earlier, the Sunnyvale Library's board of trustees had done the same.
"I still remember the days when, on Saturday morning, inventors would be lining up to search the patents and trademarks," said vice-mayor and patent attorney Otto Lee. "But those days changed with the Internet."
In a letter to City Manager Amy Chan, U.S. trademark office director of customer information services Ted Parr said it was time for a change. The city was paying almost $50,000 a year, and the trademark office was paying $90,000 annually to support resources that could be accessed almost entirely free of charge on the Internet.
The decision to end the city's partnership with the U.S. trademark office--the last such partnership in the country--came almost exactly a year from the day the council decided to allocate $53,000 in funds to cover the program until it could move to Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale.
The city had been subsidizing Sc[i]3 since it opened in 1994, and the program never became self-sufficient. Even with fee-based courses and seminars, the cost of the partnership was too high.
Mikio Ishimaru--a patent attorney and the man who stepped up to spearhead the Sc[i]3 rescue efforts--said even after setting up plans to move Sc[i]3 to Cogswell and finding financial backers from the intellectual property community, the Sc[i]3 Foundation could not get a response from the U.S. trademark office.
"The lack of a decision, I think, is in itself a decision," he said.
Ishimaru acknowledged many of the services Sc[i]3 used to provide can now be done online, but he said Sc[i]3 was a more efficient resource. Recently, he said he browsed through more than 1,500 patents in less than two days using the program's direct link to the U.S. trademark office, a search he said would have taken up to three weeks had he done it from a desktop computer in an office.
Ishimaru said Sunnyvale is going to suffer for losing that link and the people who came to Sc[i]3 to speak and teach because the program fueled the innovation that spurred Silicon Valley's development.
"We have a tremendous number of solo inventors in the valley, and Sc[i]3 was the one resource center I could send them to," Ishimaru said.
Although Sc[i]3 --which refers specifically to the partnership with the U.S. trademark office--is ending, the library will continue to be a patent and trademark depository library. Both Ishimaru and Lee said they hope the library will continue to host speakers and other professionals to teach people about intellectual property law. To continue the depository library, the city has allocated an additional $5,000 annually to the library.
"I think a patent and trademark depository library is really the best we can hope for at this point in time," Ishimaru said.
