Monday, April 15, 2013

Patent Grabber: US publication downloads broken by USPTO changes

Changes at the USPTO have broken Patent Grabber's ability to download US published patent applications. I am working on a fix.

In the meantime, the workaround is to download US applications using Patent Grabber's "International" option. That downloads the US applications from the EPO rather than the USPTO. There are, however, two changes that you must make:

1) Each publication number must be preceded by "US";

2) the publication number, itself, must be only 10 digits in length. So delete the zero that follows the four digits of the year.