The EP searching problem affects Patent Grabber

The EP searching problem that I posted about earlier affects Patent Grabber's ability to do EP searching. So for time being, any EP searches performed using Patent Grabber or Espacenet's "EP-only" collection will not return any hits that were published after August 22, 1012.

EP searching using the "Advanced" option at worldwide.espacenet.com has a problem

If you use the Espacenet "Advanced" searching option and use the "collection" drop down to limit searching to only EP publications, there is a problem. No applications that were published after August 22, 2012 will be returned in your search results!

The EPO is aware of this problem, but the search page does not say anything about it. Their suggestion is to select the "Worldwide" option from the "collection" drop down, and put "EP" into the publication number field to limit search results to EP publications. This suggestion does not help if you wish to use full text searching since the EP collection provides for full text searching and the Worldwide collection does not.

Hopefully this issue will be fixed soon.

Patent Grabber 6.1 is now available.

Patent Grabber 6.1 is now available. Fixed the U.S. published application downloading problem. EPO text is now downloaded more fully. Changed "demo mode" to allow one click to download one full length patent as opposed to the first five pages of an unlimited number of patents.

http://www.blazingdawn.com/patent_tools.html

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.

Patent Grabber 6.1 coming soon!

Working on Patent Grabber(TM) 6.1. If you have found something that needs to be fixed or improved, please let me know.

Patent Grabber 6.0 for Windows is available!

Patent Grabber 6.0 for Windows is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn Software "Patent Tools" page. This includes the two new download options, Claim Report and Abstract Report, as well as a host of fixes.

Patent Grabber 6.0 is here with Mountain Lion compatibility!

Patent Grabber 6.0 for Mac OS X is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn Software "Patent Tools" page. This version is Mountain Lion compatible. It also adds two new download options: Claim Report and Abstract Report. Those reports were previously limited to use with search results. There are also lots of fixes (e.g., PCT searching works again; EP title searching works again).