Instructions for obtaining detailed information about patents
from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website
Prepared by Van Metre Lund, Autran
inventor and former Patent Office employee.
To see and print out copies
of patents:
1. Go to www.uspto.gov
2. Under Patents, click
Search
3. Get set up to Print. In lower part of screen find and click “How
to Access Full Page Images”
Follow
instructions. Note that there are two options, AlternaTIFF or InterneTIFF
With InterneTIFF, you get a 5
day trial of a program which I use and which costs around $50, as I recall. If you expect to do a lot of printing of patents,
I recommend it. Among other things, it allows you to give one command to print out an
entire patent. If you don’t buy it, you can still print out individual pages of
patents, one by one, which is not impossible to do. (I
believe that AlternaTIFF only allows you to print out pages one by one.)
I also note that when I first
tried printing out patents, I had trouble using IE but found that Netscape worked OK and
continue to use it. It may be that IE now
works OK but haven’t tried it.
4. After (or Before) being set up to print, go back
to where you were after step 2 and click Advanced Search.
If you know the number of a patent that you want to look at, e.g. 6622635,
enter pn/6622635. If you want to see all the
patents in a particular class such as class 104 which has many patents relating to
automated transport, enter ccl/104/$. If you
want to see all patents which contain the phase “transportation system”, enter
“transportation system” and you will get a list of around 2000 patents. You can
of course, add additional terms to limit the number of patents which come up.
To view or print actual pages of a patent that you find, click “Images” after
getting set up to print
