The USPTO shut down Private PAIR and EFS-Web on November 8th, making Patent Center the sole USPTO system to file and manage patent applications, despite still having known issues. Unfortunately, a fairly recent update of Patent Center appears to have been intentionally designed to prevent automated web scraping. As a result, ClaimMaster no longer fully automates downloading of file wrapper documents from Patent Center and bibliographic data for unpublished applications (i.e., in “Private” view of Patent Center after 2-factor authentication). This is only an issue for unpublished applications, as ClaimMaster can still automatically extract biblio data from the “Public” view of Patent Center and download the same IFW documents from the PEDS service. For unpublished applications, we have designed the following semi-manual import tool that will let you pull bibliographic data from Patent Center with almost no additional work.
New biblio import tool for the “Private” view of Patent Center
If you need to fill out an Office Action response shell, an IDS form, or any other USPTO form with bibliographic data for an unpublished application, use the following steps to import the unpublished application data from Patent Center.
- Set the source to “Patent Center (manual import)”
First, set the data source to the “Patent Center (manual import)” option in the “Biblio Source” tab of whichever ClaimMaster tool you are using (e.g., shell generation, IDS form generation, USPTO forms, etc.)
Note – if you are normally working only with unpublished applications, you can set the “manual import” option as the default source in ClaimMaster’s preferences under the “Biblio Data and PAIR Options” tab:
- Start application data lookup
Specify the desired application # and click on “Lookup biblio data” button:
If the “Patent Center (manual import)” option is specified, ClaimMaster will then open the new import tool that lets you open and import data from the dedicated Patent Center web page for the unpublished application # (the same approach also works for published apps). One way to import biblio data into ClaimMaster is to pull it from an XML data file available from Patent Center. Another option is to simply scrape the data directly from that webpage text. Notably, for an inexplicable reason, Patent Center XML files often lack certain biblio items, such as customer numbers or examiner names. Therefore, we recommend scraping the data directly from Patent Center site as the most reliable way for getting all of the biblio information.
- Open Patent Center page for the specified application
In the import tool window, click on the “Open PC page using default browser” button to open the biblio page for the specified application # in your default browser (e.g., Edge, Chrome, Opera, etc.). Notably, if you’ve previously logged in to Patent Center and are in “Private” view, the new page will also open in “Private” view, so you don’t need to re-login. Otherwise, you’ll need to log-in to USPTO.gov and pass 2-factor authentication to view information for unpublished applications listed under your customer number.
- Option A – scrape all data from the opened Patent Center page (gets all biblio data)
This option takes a few extra clicks, but should get all of the biblio data from the Patent Center page. Simply select biblio region of the opened page with a mouse or you can click Ctrl+A to select the entire page. Then press Ctrl+C or right-click and select “Copy” to copy the contents of the web page into Windows clipboard.
Next, paste the copied text in the ClaimMaster import window by either pressing Ctrl+V or right-clicking and selecting “Paste“. ClaimMaster will then import all of the relevant bibliographic data from the pasted text:
You’ll be able to view and edit the imported biblio data directly in the window. Simply click on “Save Biblio Data” button to finish the import process. The entire import operation took a few extra clicks and is super fast.
- Option B – import biblio data from the downloaded Patent Center XML
Alternatively, you can download biblio data even faster from a Patent Center XML data file, but this approach might miss some of the data if it’s not provided by the USPTO in the file. When the Patent Center page for the desired application # opens in your browser (see previous step), simply click on the “Download” button at the right top of the page to download of XML data file to your browser’s default download folder.
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Once the XML file download is complete, ClaimMaster will automatically detect the file in the folder and extract bibliographic information from it. In case you already have an XML biblio file previously downloaded from Patent Center stored on your computer, you can directly point ClaimMaster to that file to extract biblio data.
In both cases, the imported biblio data will be shown in the import window, where you can edit and save it, as described for the above step.
The new semi-manual import only takes a few additional clicks and ensures that you can always quickly import bibliographic data for unpublished application from Patent Center after Private Pair is shut down. It is also browser-independent and is still much faster than manually copying & pasting individual field values from Patent Center page into your Office Action responses or forms.
For more information about this feature, check out the Online Manual.
If you are interested in other tools for Patent Center, check out these step-by-step tutorials: