OCR = Optical Character Recognition, software that attempts to figure out what text is contained in an image, generally reading an image and producing a text file. On the patent office’s web site there are a couple of date based differences in what data is available. For patents, there isn’t a lot of data associated … Continue reading “OCRing USAMark Tiffs”
Month: February 2021
OCRed Plant Patents
Bulk data became a thing a few years ago, so I downloaded the USMark trademark zip files, all 43,000 of them. I then ocr’ed a little over a million of the registration certificates in the zip files and put them into a searchable database. Then I did the same thing for plant patents, which began … Continue reading “OCRed Plant Patents”
The Python Wrapper
This has nothing to do with a snake in a hoodie, laying down rhythmic rhymes, that would be Python The Rapper 🙂 The same people who wrote the Patentsview api also wrote a python wrapper that produces a csv file for you. All you need to do is download the code and dependencies (instructions provided in the … Continue reading “The Python Wrapper”
Reissued Patents
I’m one of the developers of datamp.org, an online database of tool patents. I’m also one of the handful of people who enters tool patents there. I was surprised to find a reissued patent on the uspto’s web site for a utility patent I had entered into datamp. If you find a reissued patent on … Continue reading “Reissued Patents”
Patents not in bulk xml files
I nearly fell out of my chair when the patent office announced that they would be giving away their data for free! How cool is that? Free data, where is the catch? It turned out there isn’t one, well maybe a very small one, percentagewise that is. Each quarter the Patentsview api team processes all … Continue reading “Patents not in bulk xml files”
TSDR and the api key
The T in USPTO (Unites States Patent and Trademark Office), you should have just learned, stands for Trademark. Their TSDR (Trademark Status & Document Retrieval) api deals with trademarks. If you’ve used it recently, you probably noticed that they now require an api key, which you can get by registering with them. Their Swagger-UI page … Continue reading “TSDR and the api key”
A Rookie Mistake
There are around 11,000 registration certificates that are not online. They correspond to dead trademarks that have no legal standing. I was researching tool companies that held some of these missing trademarks. I requested copies from the patent office through a patent librarian I know. On one request I mixed up the serial number and … Continue reading “A Rookie Mistake”