Prime example of a government function that could benefit from the open source community. If all this patent data were dumped today, in whatever format it's stored in, I guarantee we'd be seeing a bunch of cool ShowHNs within days and all of us would be better off for it.
Does seem like I spoke too soon, though the above link is not everything. I downloaded it and it's a CSV file with three fields -- a patent ID (I think), a date, and some other number.
