Some comments on PTO-EFS

Nipper's Invent Blog has some discussion of the
new electronic filing system.

UPDATE:

Nipper also discusses greasemonkey:

Surfing the 'net earlier I stumbled on a Greasemonkey script called PatentHelper. PatentHelper:

* adds link from USPTO patent documents to the corresponding document on EPO, and vice versa.
* Adds links to the PDF’s (from EPO’s site)
* It adds EPO-links to all references on USPTO’s pages and fetches the titles of the USPTO references.
* Hyperlinks US patent numbers found on EPO’s pages, for instance on the description page
* Hyperlinks patent numbers in “also published as” box on EPO, and in other places that use the same syntax.
* Hyperlinks inventor names and applicant names to EPO searches.
* Tips: EPO’s site has PDFs, good classification links and nice layout. USPTO’s site has good reference lists and referenced-by search.

UPDATE:

Larry Kasoff left a comment to my previous post on Greasemonkey patent scripts with a link to this set of three tools: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=USPTO&submitform=Search

What does it do? It modifies the “Search Bar” in FireFox to add USPTO searches for Number, Inventor and/or Assignee. See the below snapshot: