Privacy, Terms, and Usage Options

Patent Fetcher Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Subscription Options
Last Updated: May 15, 2005

• Privacy Policy
• Subscription/Access Options
• Additional Terms of Use
• Forthcoming Features

In light of the limited bandwidth situation on our free site, we have opted to make our Patent Fetcher technology available with more bandwidth under two special programs:

• The Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher service, where each patent or published application PDF download costs just 65 cents (U.S.) - Click here for details on how to use the new Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher service  
• A special subscription program known as the Private Label Patent Fetcher Web site. Details on this program follow immediately below.

Private Label Patent Fetcher Subscription

Under this program, we set up a Web site at a special Web address for a subscriber, on a virtual server separate from that running the public Patent Fetcher service. This allows for significantly improved bandwidth, as well as the ability to customize the look and feel of the service to match the subscriber's needs.

In this manner, subscribers to Patent Fetcher still benefit from the 370GB+ (and growing) archive of U.S. Patents and Applications we maintain on our network file servers, plus they still have access to the download of patents from the U.S. PTO and EPO Web sites which are not presently in the archive.

The subscription fees for the above program are as follows:

One-Time Set-up Fee
Initiating a subscription would require paying a one-time set-up fee to cover our expenses in setting up a separate virtual server. The private Web address for the service would akin to http://YOURCOMPANY.PatentFetcher.com. We would also work with your IT manager to arrange linkage with your in-house intranet, if desired. Access to the site would be password controlled (via a single user name and password) to limit use to the subscriber, and those authorized to use the site by the subscriber (e.g. a subscriber may want to provide access to select clients).

There are two set-up options:

• $500 for a custom look & feel to the subscription version of Patent Fetcher, based on the subscribers existing Web site look & feel.
• Alternately, if a custom look & feel is not necessary, the set-up fee would be $250. Pages on the site would like virtually identical to those on the current Patent Fetcher Web site.

Monthly Hosting & Service Fee
In addition to the one-time set-up fee, there would be a monthly fee to cover cost of bandwidth, cost of server and file server maintenance, and cost of new updates and upgrades to the Patent Fetcher software and technology. The monthly fee in the chart below is based on the number of typical active users of the service by the subscriber. A typical active user is one who downloads several PDFs a day. We measure "active users" as the maximum number of different users who might use our service over the course of a single 24-hour period. In turn, using the estimated number of typical active users and based on median patent size, we allocate a fixed amount of bandwidth to the private version of the Patent Fetcher site, with ability for higher levels of burstable traffic to compensate for less usage at night and on weekends and more usage during the typical business day. However, should some users of a subscriber be disproportionately heavy users of the private site, it will have a negative impact on other regular users trying to use the site at the same time. The price structure is as follows:

It should be noted that the above prices are a pittance compared to fees that other paid-patent services charge (typically ranging from $3-9 per patent or application, or high monthly fees for a single user). Foreign publications are presently those for which images are offered by the European Patent Office, which includes publications starting with the following country codes: AP, AT, BA, BE, BG, CA, CH, CY, DD, DE, DK, EE, EP, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, IE, IT, JP, LU, MC, NL, OA, PT, RO, RU, SE, SU, and WO.

Should we find that a subscriber is exceeding their subscribed number of active users or our predicted subscriber patent volumes for a sustained period of time, we will notify the subscriber of this and suggest an appropriate course of action. Also, "active users" covers only live humans (or other sentient organic creatures capable of typing or cutting & pasting patent numbers into our search forms). Automated patent "ripper" software designed to rapidly extract patents via our servers does not qualify as an active user, and if we detect such being used by a subscriber, we will immediately terminate the subscription with no refund of unused fees. We also reserve the right to revise our internal bandwidth and patent quantification metrics as we see fit.

Minimum subscription commitment term is 3 months, and we invoice in 3 month increments. Credit cards also accepted for monthly billing if desired. Cancellation of the service, served by confirmed e-mail, FAX, or letter, would go into effect at the end of the current billing period. Subscription costs are subject to change without notice, however existing subscribers will receive three months notifice via e-mail of any change in such costs as it affects their subscriptions.

Additional Subscription Options
For those subscribers wishing to personalize the service further, we offer the option of labeling each page of a downloaded patent with text or even a logo in the page footer area. This text could say something like "Patent provided by XYZ & ABC LLP - Leaders in Patent Matters - Page N of M", for example. If desired, there would be a one-time fee of $500 to set up this feature.

We are also planning a number of improvements to our Patent Fetcher in the months ahead. Please see Forthcoming Features below.

Subscriber Support
Support for subscribers is available via e-mail or phone during ordinary U.S. East Coast business hours. Subscribers will need to designate a primary and secondary contact within their firms, and only support requests from those contacts will be acknowledged and responded to with respect to subscription-related problems.

Additional Terms of Use

In addition to the above terms which apply to subscribers, it must be noted that the patent PDFs offered by our Patent Fetcher technology are covered under copyright by Stroke of Color, Inc., as we have reformatted and assembled the pages we have retrieved from public domain sources. However, we grant license to all users of Patent Fetcher to redistribute our patent PDFs to their associates and clients free of additional charge, with one exception. Namely, Patent Fetcher generated PDFs may not be individually or collectively resold by companies whose primary business is the sale of patent and patent related documents unless a special licensing fee is negotiated in advance, based on a per patent charge.

We also reserve the right to block access to our servers to excessive users of our free, non-paid Patent Fetcher service, without notice, as such users prevent other users from accessing the site due to our bandwidth constraints.

Stroke of Color, Inc. makes no warrantees or guarantees as to the validity, usability and clarity of patents download from our site, as all of our material comes from public domain sources such as the U.S. PTO and espacenet, via automaton. Should a request be made to fetch a patent not in our archives, it will be retrieved from the appropriate service and then archived for others to use as well. Should the service we retrieve individual patent pages from (and then assemble into a single PDF file) for some reason be unavailable, perhaps due to server problems, network outages, or programming changes, for example, our service may not operate either until such problems are resolved. For paying users of the Patent Fetcher service, subscription credit in proportion to the duration of such outages, where the outages last for more than 24 hours, will be given in the form of an automatic subscription extension. One way to think of it is as a "snow day" for patent retrieval services. No refunds will be made however.

Other subscription and license terms may be added here as the need for such terms arises.

Initiating a Subscription
If you or your company would like to initiate a subscription under the above subscription options, please contact us,

Forthcoming Features

We are also planning on expanding Patent Fetcher to include a number of asked for features over the coming months:

• Individual user log-ons. This will allow our Patent Fetcher subscribers/users to better track their active users' use of Patent Fetcher, plus it will enable a number of new features.
• Up-to-date listing of the top 10 most popular patent and application downloads in case you're curious about this information (we certainly are).
• Multiple patent fetches. Will permit users to enter a list of patent numbers to fetch, and will make them available in a ZIP file. This feature will require the delayed fetching feature described below.
• Client code use. This will allow users of Patent Fetcher to attach a client code to their fetches so they can optionally track their fetches on a per client basis. If the interest is strong enough, we might even be able to include time spent doing the fetch in client code reporting. Requires the user log-on feature, and may be an additional fee item. (NOTE: This feature was made available in our Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher in October 2003.)
• Delayed fetching. For non-urgent patent needs (especially for large patents over 200 pages in size), we will add the ability to add patents to a delayed fetch queue, and then notify the requestor via e-mail (requires the user log-on feature) that a patent is ready to download from our servers.
• Fetch Status Indicator - instead of being faced with a blank browser window, waiting for patents to be fetched from the PTO Web site, we are planning on offering a window which provides status on the number of pages fetched so far.
• A free newsletter about various patent issues as they arise as well as changes in our Patent Fetcher system.

Recently Released Features:

• October 2003 - To assist people who want faster downloads of patents cached on our servers, we now offer our Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher, where, for a nominal fee of $0.99 per patent, you can download patent PDFs from a high bandwidth, high speed Web server.
• November 2003 - The fetching of EP & WO patents and applications from the esp@cenet site, where they are presently stored as single page PDFs. Patent Fetcher now provides such patents and applications as single, multi-page PDFs for our users' convenience. There will be a small extra fee to use this service due to increased bandwidth and storage requirements. Currently this service is available on a single use basis via our Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher.
• December 2003 - Bandwidth rate limiter for heavy users of our free Patent Fetcher site. In order to make the free version of Patent Fetcher usable for the largest number of individual users, we have added a priority scheme so that heavy users of the free site will find their download performance decreasing the more patents they download, which thus enables low volume users to get more speedy downloads. High volume users downloads are also stamped with an origination notice. High volume users should consider a subscription or using the Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher.
• January 2004 - Permanent price drop on Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher to just 65 cents per download. Users of the free Patent Fetcher site are also now limited to 5 unstamped publication downloads, and 5 stamped, rate limited publication downloads per 24 hour period.
• May 2004 - Moved the slow free Patent Fetcher to http://free.patentfetcher.com. The Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher is now at http://www.patentfetcher.com
• November 2004 - Introduced new Patent Fetcher logo

If you have suggestions for other features, please contact us. Also, if you would like to financially sponsor (and thereby accelerate the schedule for) any of the above features, let us know.

Please note that one feature we are not presently planning on adding is OCRing of patent pages to create text searchable patent image PDFs. We have looked at this issue in depth, and based on our resources, and the available technology, we don't think there is an effective and affordable way to accomplish this at this time.

Privacy Policy

As of November, 2003, we started maintaining permanent logs of which patents are being fetched by which IP addresses so we could better monitor bandwidth statistics. These logs are in addition to the standard Web usage logs created by the Apache Web server which serves our pages, which rotate out after five weeks. We also maintain general site usage information for one year, but such information does not include any details as to who is fetching what, but does include information on overall patent popularity and volume of use, indexed by IP address of the user(s). That said, the details in our logs are kept private and will not be used improperly, nor shared with other parties. Subscribers will, at some point, be able to access logs for their particular sites for statistical data gathering. We will also advise our paying subscribers of any attempt by any third party to gain access, by subpoena or otherwise, to any portion of the logs containing said subscriber's access and usage information as maintained in connection with the Patent Fetcher service. We reserve the right to revise this section with additional or replacement information as to what we log, retain, and use, and what we don't log, retain, and use.

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