PatentRef Acceptable Use Policy (free beta)
Effective: 2026-10-08. Version: beta-1. Part of the Terms of Service at patentref.io/docs/legal/terms. Operator: Aaron Baker, Tucson, Arizona, United States.
PatentRef exists so that people and their agents can use public patent data without a sales conversation. Almost everything is allowed. This page lists what is not, so that one user cannot spoil the Service for the rest.
Allowed, and encouraged
- Research, teaching, journalism, product work, agent workflows, bulk analysis within your plan's limits.
- Running the published client libraries, notebooks and MCP servers against patentref.io.
- Downloading the published snapshot and querying it yourself; there is no limit on what you do with a copy, only the attribution in the license register.
- Automated use. Agents are the primary audience. An agent is bound by this policy exactly as the person who runs it.
- Caching responses and republishing results with the attribution lines from patentref.io/LICENSES.md.
Not allowed
- Attacking the Service. No denial of service, no probing for vulnerabilities without written permission, no attempts to read other users' data or keys, no attempts to write to the snapshot or the account store.
- Evading limits. No multiple accounts to multiply a free allowance, no rotating keys or addresses to get around a 429, no disposable email domains for sign-up, no sharing one key across unrelated users or products.
- Scraping the website. The API is the way to get data. Crawling the status page, the sign-up page or, later, the record pages at a rate that affects other users is not. Standard search engine crawlers that honor robots.txt are fine.
- Misrepresentation. Do not present PatentRef output as a legal opinion, as a statement from the USPTO, or as PatentsView itself. Do not strip the data_version and as-of date when you show status facts to someone else. Do not remove the attribution the license requires.
- Registry abuse (when the registry opens). No spam records, no near-duplicate flooding, no records whose purpose is to harass, defame or expose someone, no malware in files, no personal data of other people without their permission, no claims of inventorship you know to be false, no content you have no right to publish.
- Impersonation. No account in someone else's name, no owner claims on patents you do not own, no false declarations in the owner console.
- Unlawful use. Nothing that breaks the law where you are or where we are, including export control and sanctions law.
- Reselling access. Do not resell or sublicense API access itself. Building a product on top of the API is fine; the product's users must not be sharing your single key.
How we enforce it
- Automatic limits answer most problems: per-key and per-address rate limits, request size and query cost caps, sign-up caps per domain, and a block list of disposable email domains. A 429 or 400 from a limit is not an accusation; wait and retry.
- A key or account that breaches this policy may be throttled, suspended or revoked, with notice by email where practical. Repeated or serious breaches end the account.
- Registry content that breaches this policy can be hidden or removed; a record's hash and proof bundle stay, as the terms explain.
- We report unlawful activity to the authorities where the law requires it.
Report a problem
Abuse, a security issue, or content that should not be on the registry: abuse@patentref.io (until the mailbox is live: hello@patentref.io). For a security vulnerability, please give us a reasonable time to fix it before publishing; we will credit you if you want.
Changes
The version and effective date at the top change when this policy changes; material changes are announced on the status page and take effect 14 days after notice.