US Pre-Grant Pubs and Grants pendency

I have noticed that quite a few US Grants are published very quickly
after the PreGrant publication - sometimes just the next week or so
(other can still take several years however).

Recently I noticed a case where the Grant was actually published before
the Pre-Grant ! See US 6927249 B1 (August 9 2005) and US 2005/0176869
A1 (August 11, 2005). Whilst it is commendable that some patents are
being examined and granted quickly, I wonder how often this is actually
occuring? It is a nuisance in this case since the status code of B1
indicates that the Pre-grant was never issued - which was true at the
time - but in fact false!

On a second more important point - Is there a way to automatically
determine whether a national US application that has had the Pre-Grant
Publication issued, has since been abandoned or disallowed? In other
words, getting something like the International Search Report and seeing
X and Y's (or absence thereof) would be a good start.

I guess you can do this manually for a specific case from the
file-wrapper, but I wish to do this automatically with a list of several
hundred cases on a periodic basis - say once a quarter.

Any suggestions on how best to do this?

Thanks
Andy Gillanders
 



Received on Tue Aug 30 2005 - 15:11:24