The Patent Librarian by Michael White on “FreePatentsOnline Launches CitePatents.” — CitePatents‘ purpose it so help journalists and others understand how to best link to and cite patents. A very noble goal.
Sadly, they link to copies from FreePatentsOnline.com instead of the original documents at the USPTO (wouldn’t a journalist want to link to the original source of the information?).
Yes, the USPTO should provide PDFs…that’s beside the point.
The comments are open if you disagree.
On a related note, did you know that Wikipedia has a built in patent citation template? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_patent? The funny thing is that that template links back to espacenet.com copies of the patents/applications (if you want to link to a USPTO version you have to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:US_patent_reference or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:US_patent_application). I imagine that part of the reason for this preference for espacenet.com is….PDFs.
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