Greg,
As is prominently advised on the main PTO Web Patent Database page under
"Important Notices":
"Individuals, companies, IP addresses, or blocks of IP addresses who, in
effect, deny service to the general public by generating unusually high
numbers (1000 or more) of daily database accesses (searches, pages, or
hits), whether generated manually or in an automated fashion, may be denied
access to these servers without notice."
PTO's database access limitations are applied by source IP address (or
issued address block) regardless of the source -- individuals, companies, or
universities -- since IP address is the only information at our disposal. It
is up to aggregate sources to establish means of compliance with these
policies.
and "...If you cannot access any of the Patent Grant Database [only!] Quick
Search, Advanced Boolean Searching, or Patent Number Searching pages linked
above, your workstation or organization may have been denied access to the
Web Patent Databases. To determine if you have been denied access, or to
seek to have your access restored, send email including your workstation and
firewall or gateway IP addresses to www@uspto.gov. Consult with your network
administrators if necessary, as email without the required IP addresses will
be ignored and discarded without reply. This is for the Patent Grant
Database only!"
All email to that address comes to me, and all email which contains the
information required above is answered within two of my working days.
If this anonymous person has not received a reply, how can he state
definitively that he has been denied access?
Regards,
Larry Larson, USPTO
> -----Original Message-----
> From: srctran@WORLD.STD.COM [mailto:srctran@WORLD.STD.COM]
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 9:13 PM
> To: PIUG-L@derwent.co.uk
> Subject: Anyone being blocked from PTO database?
>
>
>
> I received the following today from a PATNEWS reader. Anyone
> experiencing the same, or know what to suggest?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg Aharonian
> ====
>
> Greg -
>
> We have been blocked out of the USPTO patents database. We are
> a heavy user, but there are larger firms than ours who have not been
> blocked out. We need to talk to someone about this, but who? We have
> tried sending emails but they go unanswered. Phone calls into the
> maze of voice mail at the PTO go unreturned also. Can you give me
> a phone number that would be answered by a person? We need to
> use the patents database.
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Feb 14 2003 - 11:56:37 GMT