Update for 2025 Changes to USPTO Patent Fees, Forms, and Biblio Data Downloads

This update addresses 2025 changes in USPTO fees and forms, as well as issues with bibliographic data scraping caused by the latest Chromium update. If you use ClaimMaster to fill out IDS forms or need to populate documents with bibliographic data, please continue reading for more information about this update.

USPTO Fees Changes and Cumulative Prior Art Submissions

The USPTO recently changed its fees and many forms, which are all updated in this ClaimMaster release. One significant change is introduction of the IDS size fees. When preparing an IDS form, you must now determine whether the cumulative number of applicant-provided items exceeds a specific threshold (i.e., 50, 100, 200). If so, you’ll need to pay a particular IDS size fee and mark a checkbox on the new SB08a form. Because the USPTO counts duplicate prior art submissions towards the cumulative number, applicants need to review all submitted IDS forms in file history and count all items, including duplicates, for fee calculation purposes. It is somewhat surprising that the USPTO decided to place the burden of such calculations on practitioners, as the USPTO likely tracks the same information in its systems. To speed up citation counting for IDS size fee purposes, we’ve updated our Prior Art Citation Explorer to count the total number of prior art citations (including duplicates) in any file history downloaded from Patent Center or a directory containing previously filed IDS forms. This should help make counting the cumulative citations easier, although care must still be taken to avoid double-counting duplicates filed in response to non-compliant citations (they count as 1 item), especially when you are close to one of the fee thresholds.

To review all citations in a directory or a file history (you can easily download one from Patent Center in XML format), go to ClaimMaster->USPTO Office Actions, Shells, Forms->Explore and Diff IDS References.

Next, select the desired IDS form, directory of IDS forms, or IFW file history downloaded from Patent Center (in XML format), and click on Load Citations. You will be able to review all prior art citations in that source, including any duplicate submissions, as well as see the cumulative counts of such submissions. Duplicate submissions will shown their “duplicate index” in parentheses similar to how Windows annotates copies of files having the same names. Hopefully, this feature will make your IDS fee calculations a little easier.

Chrome/Edge Updates

There has been an update to Edge/Chrome that was rolled out last week that is causing issues with web scraping of biblio data from Patent Center, as the latest Chromium v.132 disabled the old headless mode used by ClaimMaster to get that data with either Edge or Chrome browsers. To fix this issue, ClaimMaster will instead use a headless Chrome shell for obtaining the same data and also for printing of PDF reports. This version of Chrome is distributed by Google specifically for web scraping and PDF printing operations. It is very lightweight compared to the standard Chrome as it cannot be used like a regular browser, and is instead controlled through command-line instructions (i.e., headless).

The first time you try to download bibliographic data, ClaimMaster will prompt you to install the headless Chrome shell, which it will download from Google’s dedicated site. ClaimMaster will then automatically start using the headless shell for pulling bibliographic data from Patent Center and the rest of the operations will be transparent to you. The installation needs to happen only once.

Moreover, the USPTO is soon launching their ODP portal to replace the barely functioning PEDS. Therefore, by the end of February or early March, we’ll be able to start getting the same bibliographic data from the ODP portal via API calls, which should reduce various issues with web scraping due to changes to underlying web browsers and Patent Center itself.

So if you’ve been affected by any of the above issues, you can download this update from the Customer Portal by logging in using your license id, customer id, or email. You can install over the existing ClaimMaster installation.