Free Patent Downloads on Your PC

For a short time, websites offering free online downloading went out of vogue. Recently, however, Pat2PDF.org was started by a generous patent attorney as “a free search tool.” Pat2PDF allows you to download U.S. patents in PDF format.

Now, a Canadian attorney, Peter Eliopoulos, has taken the code from Pat2PDF given us an installation guide so that the script that can run locally on our WindowsXP systems. There is one problem with Peter’s installation guide. The Guide is only slightly longer than an AA 12-step program. Installation appears to take about an hour, and the result will be easy downloading of patents from your PC.

Update: Peter asked me to also give credit to the script’s authors Oren Tirosh and Thomas Boege.  According to Peter he “only wrote the installation instructions for those of us still using Windows.”

Suggestion: At some point, the PTO should make PDF versions of the patents freely available from their website.