uspto-search-plus

Search official USPTO patent and trademark records with a clear, safe, and repeatable research process.

Built on affaan-m/ECC by @affaan-m (261,946 stars, MIT). All credit for the original idea to them. This fork improves and repackages it; upstream license preserved in UPSTREAM_LICENSE.

🔎 Why

USPTO records live in several systems. Picking the wrong source can waste time.

Search results may be split across many pages. Missing data can also be easy to misread.

This Claude Code skill helps developers, researchers, founders, and IP teams search with care. It uses official sources first and keeps a clear research log.

It finds facts. It does not give legal advice or decide legal rights.

⚡ Install

Run one command:

curl --create-dirs -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OWNER/uspto-search-plus/main/skill/SKILL.md -o ~/.claude/skills/scientific-db-uspto-database/SKILL.md

Replace OWNER with the GitHub account that hosts this repo.

🧭 Usage

Ask Claude Code a clear question:

Use the USPTO Database skill to find US patents granted to Acme Corp in 2025.

Use official USPTO sources first. Read all result pages, remove duplicate records,
and sort by grant date and patent ID. Return the patent ID, title, date, source URL,
and a research log. Report any missing records or API errors.

Expected output:

Search summary
- Source: Official USPTO PatentSearch
- Search date: YYYY-MM-DD
- Query: Assignee "Acme Corp", grant date in 2025
- Sort: Grant date, then patent ID
- Pages checked: [count]
- Unique records: [count]

Results
| Patent ID | Title | Grant date | Official source |
|-----------|-------|------------|-----------------|
| ...       | ...   | ...        | ...             |

Limits
- A missing result does not prove that no record exists.
- Private, delayed, unpublished, or differently named records may not appear.

The skill can also guide searches for patent applications, file wrappers, filing events, trademark status, public documents, assignments, and PTAB cases.

It follows four core rules:

1. Use official USPTO sources first.
2. Check every needed page and remove duplicates.
3. Save enough detail to repeat the search.
4. Never claim infringement, validity, legal ownership, or legal rights.

🛠️ What we changed vs upstream

• Rewritten from Japanese into clearer, plain English with shorter headings and more actionable wording.
• Adds a mandatory community-author credit notice for every copied or shared version.
• Strengthens legal boundaries by naming specific conclusions the skill must not make and advising consultation with an IP lawyer.
• Expands reliability guidance with missing-record caveats, stable sorting, full pagination, deduplication, and more detailed research-log fields.
• Adds explicit API failure handling and tighter secret-safety rules, including never logging key-bearing headers.

📄 License

Released under the MIT License. The upstream MIT license and author credit are preserved in UPSTREAM_LICENSE.