Introduction
The purpose of patentdigests.com is to encourage the use of digests to supplement conventional patent search activities. Patent practitioners who concentrate on focussed technology areas will benefit from the site's detailed breakdowns compared to those provided by official classification systems.
The digests of patentdigests.com primarily contain U.S. patent documents, although non-U.S. literature is included. The publicly available community digest collections of the site are updated twice weekly with bulk patent data provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Patentdigests.com offers three levels of access:
- for the general public;
- for registered users;
- for patrons of the site.
General Public Access
General access by the public allows for browsing the section, class, subclass, main group, and subgroup titles of a Cooperative Patent Classification database (no access to document data at this access level) and for browsing the community digest collections ( again, no document data is provided at this access level ). The purpose of the general public access level is to provide a feel for the content of the site.
Registered User Access
Registering on the site requires a valid email address. Registration is free of charge and no registration data is shared with third parties. The purpose of requiring registration at this access level is to limit the load on the system databases and to reduce bandwidth requirements. Patentdigests.com sits atop a large pile of data and web-crawlers would be detrimental to the operation of the site.
By registering, the document content of the site's digests is made available to the user. A registered and logged-in user can view the documents in any subgroup in the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) database, can view the documents of any digest in the Community Digest Collections (CDC), and can view the complete CPC and CDC classifications of any document.
Patron Access
Patentdigests.com incurrs expenses for its server and for various software support tools. A patron is a user who makes monetary contributions to help defray these costs. In return for this support, a patron is allowed access to several database-intensive features of the site. A partron is able to make their own digest collections, can present document taggings to be entered into the community digest collections, and can access tools like the Digest Power Stack for enhanced searching.
A user can become a patron by supporting patendigests.com on either of the sites Patreon or Ko-fi.com .