U.S. Public Provisional Patent Applications Now On-Line

On October 29, 2004, the USPTO announced that "As a result of a recent enhancement to Public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval), most provisional applications that are relied upon for their earlier filing dates in U.S. patent application publications or U.S. patents are now available to the public over the Internet. Exceptions mainly include provisional applications with filing dates prior to 1997. . . . Due to the recent enhancement to Public PAIR, the Office has ended the transitional practice of supplying with Office actions a copy of any provisional application relied upon to give prior art effect under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) to a reference applied in a rejection."