By Donald Zuhn —

Patents Online, LLC, the company behind FreePatentsOnline, today announced the release of a companion online service, SumoBrain.  The service, which was launched this summer, offers an alternative to patent search pay services by providing free cross-collection searching, portfolios, saved search capabilities, alerts, bulk PDF download capabilities, and collaboration tools.  According to the company’s release, SumoBrain was initially conceived as a subscription service, but Patents Online decided to make the service completely free.  Patents Online CEO Erik Reeves noted that the FreePatentsOnline database, from which SumoBrain will draw its search results, currently includes 8,812,656 patents.  SumoBrain permits full-text searching of U.S. patents (1976-present), published U.S. applications (2001-present), European patents and published European applications (1991-present), PCT publications (1978-present), and English abstracts of Japanese patent applications (1996-present).  PDFs can be obtained for U.S. patents (1790-present), published U.S. applications (2001-present), European patents and published European applications (1978-present), and PCT publications (1978-present).