Patent Research and Politics: Understand the Mueller Report WITHOUT Even Reading It

by: Luke Barbin, CEO

Yesterday, I, like no doubt many of you, found myself curious about the facts and findings disclosed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report.  I can’t think of a more politically significant or anticipated document to be released into the public domain in my lifetime. 

So, on a whim, I downloaded the official report PDF from the Department of Justice website and ran it through Adobe Acrobat to OCR all 448 pages.  I wanted to be the first to conjure up opinion commentary around the office water cooler, aka Slack.  I knew that providing a searchable PDF would create some comic-relief amongst a bunch of professional keyword-connoisseuring research junkies. 

Moments later, the first volley came in from a colleague: it was a thank you for “some light Easter weekend reading”.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to read the report to get a high-level understanding of what it contained. We have developed a powerful patent research platform, Limestone, that can quickly ascertain and summarize what a technical document discloses before we even read it.  Limestone has proven more useful than we imagined in our day-to-day work of efficiently finding and evaluating complex technical documents such as scientific journal publications and patents. 

Limestone + Politics = ???

You see where I’m going with this.  I certainly don’t have time to read 448 pages of beltway drama, so I thought…”why not run the Mueller Report through Limestone, and see if it can tell me something high level without reading it?” 

One way to do that with Limestone is to categorize a document into the CPC patent classification taxonomy, so that’s exactly what I did...all in under 20 seconds.  Copy/Paste —> Submit. 

Here are the top CPC classes that Limestone recommends.  For context: If the Mueller Report were a scientific disclosure like a patent application, these classes would be target-rich categories in which to conduct research related to this document (I included my gut reaction in the far-right column):

No Collusion

Summary: Despite the Mueller Report not being a technical disclosure, Limestone provided some instant and accurate insights.  However, like the Special Counsel, Limestone did not find any Russian collusion.  As for obstruction of justice, Limestone, also like the Special Counsel, did not indict but also cannot exonerate anyone.

I’m sorry to report no Easter eggs here folks, but have a happy one anyway! 

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#intelligentproperty