We are almost done with a new 2024.5 release that will add many new and exciting features to ClaimMaster. However, before we had a chance to finalize the release, recent background updates to Edge, Chrome, Visio and also Espacenet site have caused a number of problems with ClaimMaster’s data downloading and drafting tools for the current users. Therefore, we are making a small intermediate update available that fixes the following problems until a major release is rolled out later this or early next month:
- Downloading of biblio data from Patent Center – a bug in a recent update to Chromium (v. 128 or later) has interfered with ClaimMaster’s ability to control headless Edge or Chrome browsers for pulling data from Patent Center and other websites. This update works around the bug, until it is hopefully resolved by the Chromium team in the near future.
- Scraping of English inventor names from Espacenet – Espacenet recently moved its website behind Cloudflare that has active anti-scraping protection, which prevents ClaimMaster from pulling English-transliterated inventor and assignee names for foreign patents (e.g. JP, CN, KR) when they are not available in English from other services, such as Google Patents and EPO’s OPS. Espacenet’s move behind Cloudflare affected ClaimMaster’s IDS generation and OA Analysis tools. For now, we’ve worked around this issue by going to WIPO’s Patent Scope. Although WIPO’s site is a bit slower than Espacenet, situations where WIPO lookup is necessary shouldn’t come up very often.
- Flowchart generation with Visio – last month’s update to Visio renamed some of the internal stencils. This interfered with ClaimMaster’s ability to generate new Visio flowcharts, which is fixed in this release.
- Updated SB08a form – this update also includes a new SB08a form for IDS submissions that was released by the USPTO in July.
If you’ve been affected by any of the above issues, you can download this update from Customer Portal by logging in using your license id, customer id, or email. You can install over the existing ClaimMaster installation.
Alternatively, if you’d like to test out a preview version of the upcoming release, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll provide you with a download link for the upcoming release (available staring October 14th). The preview version will also include fixes for the issues described above.