Patent Tools

Downloading – fixed multiple issues caused by changes made at the European Patent Office that prevented Patent Grabber from being able to download EP-A, PCT and International documents. The “family” option of the U.S. Biblio download feature is now working again.

Searching – added full-text EP-A searching (but it is unfortunately limited to 30 hits at the present time). Fixed all the issues with the “Sortable List”, “Abstract Report” and “Claim Report” functions that had also been adversely effected by the changes at the EPO.

Many thanks to Edi for his INPADOC bug report. Many thanks to Bob and Sarah for testing Patent Grabber on Snow Leopard, and to the numerous Patent Grabber purchasers for their suggestions!

Patent Downloading:

Patent Grabber makes it easy to download U.S. patents and published applications, European patents and published applications, PCT published applications, and patent documents from many other countries and patent-issuing organizations for free from public patent archives:

• Download multiple patents or applications with a single click
• Optionally download the patent or application text (if made available by the USPTO or EPO)
• Ver. 5.x combines all patent pages into a single PDF on Mac OS X (Tiger or later) and Windows (2000 and later)
• Windows requires two free helper applications (see Quick Start or full instructions for details)
  
• The Mac Classic version downloads the pages of each patent into their own folder (international document downloading not implemented yet)
  
• Download every page or just the pages of selected sections (e.g., just the first page and claims)
• Create a spreadsheet that contains bibliographic information for multiple U.S. patents (optional family identifier, patent number, issue date, title, filing date, application number, inventor(s), assignee, abstract, foreign priority, US class, international class, legal representative, field of search, cited U.S. patents)
  
• Download the INPADOC international legal status information for any number of patents or applications with a single click (example)
• Mac OS X Ver. 5.x can print muliple selected patents and applications with a single click
  

U.S., EP-A and PCT Searching:

• Quick - allows more search terms than the USPTO's "Quick" search (which allows only two), and is more robust (allows multiple AND and OR connectors)
  
• Advanced - the search aids (see below) make it easy to construct a complex search (not available for EP-A searching)
  
• Issuance or Publication - makes it easy to search for multiple classes, companies or other search terms in patents or published applications that were issued or published on a date or within a date range (not available for EP-A searching)
  

• Choose search field codes from a dropdown list. The list automatically adjusts depending upon whether you choose a U.S. patent, U.S. publication or PCT publication search.
  
• Custom "Date Interface" guides you through the process of entering dates and date ranges in the proper USPTO or WIPO  format
• Dropdown list of countries assists finding the correct two-letter code when you choose a search field that requires the entry of a Country Code

Each individual search result can be viewed in three ways:

• Full text
• Abstract and bibliographic information (faster than full text)
• INPADOC Patent Family (patents and applications in the U.S. and many other countries that are in some way related to a patent or application)

• Titles: a tab-delimited list of the patent/application numbers and the titles that can be opened by a spreadsheet program (e.g., MS Excel)
  
  
• Sortable List: a tab-delimited list of bibliographic information that can be opened by a spreadsheet program. This makes it easy to sort by assignee, inventor, or International Patent Classification
  
  
• Abstract Report: an HTML file that can be opened by a web browser or MS Word that contains the abstract of each patent/application along with bibliographic information
  
  
• Claim Report: a text file that contains the patent/application number, issue/publication date, title, assignee, and all of the claims of each patent or application

Requirements, Licenses and Download Links:

Patent Grabber 5.8 for Mac requires a PowerPC or Intel Mac (runs natively as a "universal binary" application). OS X Tiger (OS 10.4.x) or later (Leopard or Snow Leopard) is required.

Patent Grabber 5.8 for Windows requires a PC running Windows 2000 or later, plus the free PDFTK.exe and C42PDF.exe helper applications. See Quick Start or the full instructions for details.

Patent Grabber is initially in a free Evaluation Mode (limited to downloading the first five pages of multiple patents or a single INPADOC legal status summary).

License Fees:

Patent Grabber 5.8: $30 ($10 to upgrade from Versions 1 through 4; free upgrade from any previous Version 5.x)

Licenses may be purchased online from a link on the Blazing Dawn home page. 

Download Patent Grabber 5.8 for Mac OS X or  Windows

Family-izer^TM 2.5 (released March 2010)

What's New with Ver. 2.5: added two columns of statistical information. The first column shows the number of patents in the family. When the "International" option is selected, the second column shows the number of unique countries and/or regions in the family. When the "US only" option is selected, the second column will be blank.

Family-izer is a free web-based application to retrieve patent family information for patents and published applications. It utilizes the European Patent Office's INPADOC database. Once you have installed the free revWeb plugin from Runtime Revolution, just go to the Family-izer page to use it. However, if you do not want to do that right now, here is a snapshot of what it would look like:

Please see the Family-izer page for more information.