Does anyone know of a way to look at US patents in pdf format without using this site?
You go and download them from the patent office site, obviously. Patents can not be exclusively pay per view as that could be considered a breach of
the disclosure principle (which is the most basic reason why patents exist at all in the first place!). Utmost an administrative fee could be charged
for photocopies and such, but with Internet accessibility of the scanned material, even this can not be done anymore. So they are to remain accessible
for as long as the national states exist. Some countries have not yet scanned all the older patents, so these have to be ordered by mail, but they are
accessible even though requiring some effort and some expenses.
Which patent office you need to use depends on the national code of the patent you look for. USA patents can be accessed from either their national
patent office (USPTO) or trough most transnational patent institutions (WIPO, EPO) or trough GooglePatents (which has them OCR-ed). European countries made their patents accessible trough EPO. Since newer patents are
commonly processed firstly trans-nationally via WIPO, you can get the original document there even before a patent gets nationalized in specific
countries.The WiZard is In - 6-8-2011 at 15:43