EPO's Open Patent Services experiencing problems?

Seems the last few days that service from the EPO's "Open Patent Services" server has been very spotty. This affects the downloading of EP-A images and pre-2001 EP-B images as well as INPADOC legal status summaries. In the search function, this also will affect the viewing of bibliographic and patent family information for both U.S. and PCT search results.

This is not a Patent Grabber issue, and hopefully the problem will be cleared up soon.

Update on Patent Grabber EP-A search feature

Proof of concept for EP-A searching has been accomplished. Now comes the hard part, integrating it smoothly into the other pieces of the Patent Grabber search system.

Working on full text EP-A searching for Patent Grabber

The next new feature for Patent Grabber(TM) that I am working on is full text searching of published applications from the European Patent Office; the so-called "EP-A" publications. This is a feature that was requested by several users, and I am hopeful that I will be able to add it soon.

Patent Grabber 5.7.4 is now available

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.4 fixes a bug that prevented certain INPADOC legal status summaries from successfully downloading. The problem only occurred when a patent or application was published more than once with different "Kind Codes" using the same publication number.

Download Patent Grabber 5.7.4 for Mac OSX

Download Patent Grabber 5.7.4 for Windows

Revised build of Patent Grabber 5.7.3

If the title bar of your Patent Grabber 5.7.3 shows "-09" then please download again. Build 09 did not update on small function (patent family identifiers for the US Biblio feature). That was corrected in Build 10. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Mac OSX

Windows

Family-izer 2.5 adds two columns of statistical info

Version 2.5 of Family-izer™ adds two columns of statistical information. The first column shows the total number of family members (sure beats counting them by hand!). For the "International" option, the second column shows the number of unique countries and/or regions that are in the family. This gives a rough sense of the scope of foreign filing for a patent. For the "US only" option, the second column will always be blank.

Try Family-izer today!

Patent Grabber 5.7.3 is now available

We have just released Patent Grabber(TM) 5.7.3. This is another maintenance release to respond to changes made by the European Patent Office to their Open Patent Services server.

All users must upgrade if they wish to maintain the ability to download EP, PCT and International patents as well as INPADOC legal status information after the EPO's cut off date of March 31.