Patent Law

Robots.txt at the USPTO

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The BPAI opinions are stored on the site http://des.uspto.gov. Unfortunately that site is not crawled by web indexes such as Google or Yahoo. The problem is that the site includes a "robots.txt" file that excludes such activity. See http://des.uspto.gov/robots.txt. Robots are also blocked from crawling the USPTO patent database (http://patft.uspto.gov/robots.txt) and the PAIR site (http://portal.uspto.gov/robots.txt). Also blocked from crawling is this site: http://www.uspto.gov/web/gifs/ - what is that?

A comment under the patenthawk post on Suppression, about Hal Wegner asserting that the USPTO is suppressing information on the outcome of petitions to the USPTO-->

robots.txt only blocks if it is respected.
google respects it.
there is nothing to stop some guy from the Ukraine from scraping and indexing the site.

Full post as published by IPBiz on November 28, 2008 (boomark / email).