As you’ve probably heard, the USPTO is planning to completely replace Private PAIR with Patent Center, despite Patent Center still having ongoing issues. The exact date for the Private PAIR sunset hasn’t been announced yet, but the USPTO PAIR Announcement Page warns of the forthcoming changes. The shutdown of Private PAIR, whenever it happens, will affect +Shells ClaimMaster users who use Private PAIR for downloading bibliographic data for unpublished applications for filling out shells and USPTO forms. While the same data should be available in the Private view of Patent Center, the new Patent Center interface appears to have been designed by the USPTO to prevent automated scraping of bibliographic information after users pass 2-factor authentication (we can still automatically scrape the same data for published apps in Public view). As a result, we will not be able fully automate bibliographic data import from Patent Center. Instead, we have designed a work-around that requires minimum additional input from the users to achieve the same results.
Specifically, we’ve added a new Patent Center import option to ClaimMaster, which lets you import bibliographic data from Patent Center’s page for a given application in several alternative ways, so you can pick one that works best for you:
1. Download and import from Patent Center XML – ClaimMaster will open the biblio page for the specified US patent application in your default browser, such as Chrome or Edge. You’ll then click on the Download button at the top of that web page to start download of the XML file with bibliographic data for that application to your browser’s default download folder. Once the XML file download is complete, ClaimMaster will automatically detect the file in the folder and automatically extract bibliographic information from it.
2. Import from existing XML file – if you already have an XML biblio file previously downloaded from Patent Center stored on your computer, you can point ClaimMaster to that file to extract biblio data.
3. Import from Patent Center page contents – simply copy & paste the contents of the selected biblio section from Patent Center into ClaimMaster. We will automatically extract the biblio data from the pasted text.
The new semi-manual import options will only take one or two additional clicks and will ensure that you can always quickly import bibliographic data for unpublished application from Patent Center after Private Pair is shut down.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 the Patent Center page into your Office Action responses or forms.
Click on the links below to read more detailed posts about other improvements in ClaimMaster 2023.5: