A colleague pointed out today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has apparently begun to restrict the ability of users to make bulk downloads from Public PAIR. While we have not noticed any recent download restrictions in our own use of PAIR, our colleague indicated that attempts to download an entire file history (sans non-patent literature (NLP) documents) via Public PAIR had failed, and that subsequent attempts to download only portions of the file history had also failed.
Our colleague also indicated that the Office's Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system appears to throttle users down progressively. For example, our colleague noted that at first he could download twenty documents at a time, but the system reduced that number to ten documents and then reduced the number again to five documents. Contacting the Office's Patent Electronic Business Center (EBC), our colleague was informed that the Office does "limit bandwidth and will shut groups down completely if they exceed the data download limits for our system." The EBC agent also noted that "Public/Private PAIR was never designed to be used to download bulk data," and that the EBC had a service for bulk downloads. Most disconcerting was the agent's warning that if a user exceeded the Office's data download limits (whatever those might be), the system would "give[] you a specific error and you would not be able to download anything at that point" (to which our colleague suggested that this might pose a real problem if a user was precluded from downloading anything at all from PAIR).
The bulk download service to which the EBC agent was referring is described on the Office's Electronic Bulk Data Products webpage. There, the Office notes that it entered into a no-cost agreement with Reed Technology Information Services (RTIS) in June 2013 "to make patent and trademark public bulk data more readily available to the public free of charge." The Office also notes that "Reed Tech is also continuing work on a special data product consisting of Public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval) data, which is not currently available from the USPTO in bulk form." Reed Tech's Public PAIR bulk patent data can be accessed here.
Our colleague pointed out two issues with Reed Tech's service. First, not all applications are available for download, and second, the slow-downloading .zip file provided by Reed Tech contains a separate .pdf file for every document in the file history.
While the download restrictions were news to Patent Docs, a check of the Office's PAIR FAQs webpage suggests that the limits may not be an entirely new development. In particular, that webpage includes one FAQ on point:
Does PAIR limit Image File Wrapper (IFW) downloads?
To maintain general availability of USPTO information and services provided on the Internet, any activity or operation by a third party that has the potential to cause a denial or diminution (decrease) of services to other customers, whether generated automatically or manually, will result in the Office's denying access to the Office Internet resources to that third party.
Patent Docs is interested in hearing from readers as to whether they have experienced problems making bulk downloads from either Private or Public PAIR.
