Recent News
We're in the Dec 2006 of Intellectual Property Today magazine! Click here to see a PDF of the article.
2007-10-22 (Week of)
Some of you may have noticed that Patent Tools was inaccessible during this past week. Due to fires in Southern CA, we packed up all of our servers and left the area in a hurry. Thankfully, our area is safe and secure now so we have returned!
2007-6-9
A new version of the Desktop Tools has been released! Please contact us if you are an existing customer and need the updated version.
The Search Results tool has also been updated to work with the USPTO Published Application Search URLs (previously, it only worked with URLs on searches of the issued patents).
2007-3-31
A bug in the Table Generator which resulted in Page Not Found errors when trying to download your table has been fixed. If you ever have a problem with any of the tools, please let us know and we will promptly fix them.
2007-2-12
A new tool has been added! You can now provide the URL from a USPTO search or Google Patents search and the tool will gather all of the results into a single Excel spreadsheet for you. Especially useful if you then feed the desired results through the Table Generator.
2006-12-27
The Table Generator has been updated so that you can include just claim 1 in your charts (previously, you could include all independent claims or no claims).
2006-12-22
The Patent Family Tree tool has been updated to provide more information regarding each family member that is shown. You can also click on a link to view the issued patents and published patent applications. Note that this new tool is currently in ALPHA and may or may not work properly. Please report any errors and/or problems and we welcome any feedback you may have.
2006-12-15
The Claim Tree tool has been updated! Clicking on a claim number will now take you to that claim in the Patent Navigator. The Patent Navigator will also allow you to search the USPTO for patents which reference the one you're viewing by simply clicking the link at the bottom labelled "Referenced By" in the References section.
A new version of the PC software has been released! It will allow you to download PDFs of patents right to your desktop! The desktop version supports not only utility and re-issue patents, but also supports pre-grant publications, design patents, plant patents and statutory invention registrations.
2006-11-24
Happy Thanksgiving! A bug in the Independent Claim Comparison Chart Generator has been fixed. You can now actually get the dependent claims in your chart properly now.
2006-10-31
Happy Halloween! The Patent Navigator tools has been updated with a brand new layout! This new layout has been optimized for ease of use and making the information you seek more readily accessible. Please try it out and report any errors and/or problems. We also welcome any feedback you may have.
2006-10-4
A new tool has been released! The Patent Family Tree will create a simple diagram of the parents and/or children for any given patent. Note that this new tool is currently in ALPHA and may or may not work properly. Please try it out and report any errors and/or problems. We also welcome any feedback you may have.
2006-9-19
The Patent Summary tool has been renamed to "Quick View" as it's primary use is to allow users to quickly review multiple patents at a very high level.
2006-9-17
Subscriptions for downloading PDFs of US Patents are now available in addition to the free tools! Being a subscriber eliminates any page limits on the PDFs, increases your privacy, and allows downloading of OCR'd PDFs. Please let me know if you have any problems.
For more information, see the subscriptions page.
This feature will be superceded by the Desktop Tools feature for downloading PDFs (coming soon!).
2006-9-11
Three of the most popular tools are now available on your desktop!
2006-8-30
The Patent Summary tool now allows you to gather the cover pages of multiple patents into a single document. Great for a "first-past" review of many patents. Simply select the PDF option to utilize this feature.
2006-8-23
The Table Generator now supports Patent Applications!
2006-8-14
A new feature has been added to the Claim Chart Generator. You can now select the option to "Use Claim Selector" which will allow you to mark each desired claim. This should allow you to easily select a subset of the claims to chart without having to manually enter each claim number.
2006-8-05
Some connectivity issues between the website and database have been resolved. These issues previously resulted in errors where patents could not be retrieved.
2006-7-29
The Claim Tree Generator will now automatically create a Word document for you containing the claim tree. Click the link provided at the bottom of the page that displays the tree to download the document.
2006-7-23
The server upgrade has been successfully completed. Please let me know if you have any problems. Patent Tools now runs on its own dedicated server! Please consider supporting further development by making a donation or becoming a sponsor of this website. Thanks!
2006-7-21
There will be a server upgrade this weekend which means the site may be down at various times from Friday 5pm to Sunday 11:59pm PST.