Patent Grabber: Change at USPTO also effects published applications

Sorry, but contrary to yesterday's post, US patent applications are also adversely effected by the USPTO's switch to PDF downloads. Patent Grabber only appears to be downloading the application pages. However, the pages are blank!

I will be releasing a fix for both US patents and published applications as soon as I can. In the meantime, you may still download US patents and published applications using Patent Grabber's "International" option. Using that option downloads the pages from the EPO's library. Just be sure to precede each patent and publication number with the "US" country code.

USPTO goes to PDF downloads. Patent Grabber needs modification.

USPTO has gone to PDF downloads after years of saying that it was too onerous and expensive to do so. As a result, Patent Grabber will hang if you try to download US patents. You can use the "International" downloading option for US patents as a stopgap measure (remember to add the "US" country code).

Even though US published patent applications are also now available in PDF format from the USPTO, Patent Grabber does is not having a problem with them. Go figure!

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.