The Invent Blog® » 2008 » January :: The Patent Blog of Stephen M. Nipper

One bad apple…all practitioners suffer (The USPTO and Easy Access to Public Data)

January 31, 2008 on 11:03 am | In Patent Searching, USPTO | 4 Comments

One of my favorite quotes is:

The … right to criticize either by temperate reasoning, or by immodest and indecent invective, … is the ultimate source of (citizens’) authority. –Judge Learned Hand

That being said, I was thrilled to see Matt Buchanan’s new “opinions” page on his blog where he speaks his piece. For instance, in his latest post he tackles the USPTO’s recent incidents of limiting (or at least making less accessible) public data. Another example is the addition of the verification code in Public PAIR.

I presume* the USPTO took those actions to deal with a few data/bandwidth abusers, but am not thrilled that the data is less accessible to legitimate use by the public (and practitioners) than it used to be. One bad apple…

[*I say “presume” because I haven’t seen a public explanation posted anywhere (let me know if I missed it) from the USPTO explaining why they are changing things. Need to know basis, I guess…]

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PAIR, now with an additional step

Another site for patent searching

Internet Access to Patent Application Files Now Available

Four Years!

January 4, 2008 on 1:29 am | In Weblogs | 1 Comment

Crikey, I’ve been updating this blog for four years now?

[First Post]

Oh, how the patent blogging landscape has changed since then. When I started the blog, I would post on any and everything patent related that I could find…lawsuits, new Federal Circuit cases, funny “TGIF” posts…whatever caught my eye that day. Over the next few weeks-months, Buchanan’s blog, Sorocco’s blog, Crouch’s blog (and other patent blogs) came on the scene. Each new patent blog finding its own niche, pushing the others to find their own niches too. The diversity of patent blogs right now is astounding…and I’ve had a great time getting to know my fellow authors, making some amazing friends in the process.

I’ve really enjoyed the past four years…here’s to the next four! Thanks for reading!

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“What the Funny…Patents” blog (wtfpatents.com) goes live

1000 down…

Three?

Cross-Hatching in Patent Drawings

January 3, 2008 on 10:32 am | In The-Practice-of-Law, USPTO | Comments Off

One of the best parts of blogging is having your own personal “knowledge management” system…so you can more easily find frequently used links, documents, etc. That being said…

The USPTO Guide for the Preparation of Patent Drawings (Microsoft Word document, ~140 pages long, ~6MB in size) has a few pages showing preferred cross-hatching. Here’s a local link to a PDF of just the three pages on cross hatching.