Released Patent Grabber 5.8!

Patent Grabber(TM) 5.8 is now available. This version adds full-text searching of EP-A applications (limited to 30 hits). It more importantly fixes the downloading issues with EP, PCT and International patent documents that had been caused by changes at the European Patent Office.

Downloading EP-A, PCT and pre-2002 EP-B temporarily broken

Those mischievous folks at the EPO have done it again! Minor changes to their coding has broken Patent Grabber's ability to download EP-A and PCT applications, as well as pre-2002 EP-B patents. The fix is trivial but tedious. A new version will be available shortly.

EPO servers appear to be back to normal!

The EPO's servers that Patent Grabber relies upon appear to be working normally again. Hopefully they will stay that way!

EPO confirms that Open Patent Services is experiencing problems

The European Patent Office has confirmed that their Open Patent Services (OPS) server is experiencing problems.

For Patent Grabber(TM) users, this will likely cause problems with downloading EP published applications, EP granted patents earlier than 1999, and INPADOC legal status summaries. It will also cause problems for the "Include family identifiers" option of the U.S. Patent Biblio spreadsheet. For reviewing search results, there will be problems with using the "Biblio" and "Family" radio buttons that are next to the search results field.

We will let you know when the issue has been resolved.

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.