The Mac-Stacks Emporium is now shipping a new version of Patent Grabber, bringing it to version 2.0. Patent Grabber is an automatic download utility designed for finding specific user defined patent pages. The update features improved Acrobat downloading. According to The Mac-Stacks Emporium:
The Mac-Stacks Emporium (www.kagi.com/mac-stacks or www.macos.net/mac-stacks) today announced that it has released Patent Grabber 2.4 which has the newly added ability to download published U.S. patent applications from free public archives. Additionally, other new features were added.
In 2001, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) started publishing patent applications for the first time. Up until then, U.S. patent applications were held in secret. Patent Grabber 2.4 has often requested ability to download these published patent applications for free from the USPTO web site. Published applications provide advance warning about the types of inventions for which patents might be granted in the years ahead.
Ver. 2.4 also resolves an issue that prevented users from downloading certain U.S. patents in Adobe Acrobat(R) format (those with a "Kind Code" of B2, meaning that the patent was granted after the application was published as described above). Earlier versions of Patent Grabber would only download the B2 patents in TIFF format.
You can find more information about the Patent Grabber update at The Mac-Stacks Emporium Web site. Patent Grabber 2.4 is free for registered users, whiule the full version is available for US$20.00.