Privacy Policy

Reading this site is anonymous. It sets no cookies, shows no advertising, and offers no account to create and nothing to log in to. Nothing you do here attaches to you or to any record about you. The site does keep a count of how often readers open each page and download each opinion — totals that describe the documents, not the people reading them. The only personal information it would ever hold is an email address, and only if you choose to give one to the weekly digest. Everything below explains both.

The Email Digest

The digest is open, and it is the only part of this site that asks you for anything. It is free, there is no account, and reading the archive never requires it — every opinion here stays free to read whether you subscribe, unsubscribe, or ignore it entirely.

Each issue lists the patent opinions issued in the previous seven days, once a week. United States law requires a physical postal address in commercial email, so every issue carries ours in the footer. It is a mailbox, not a home address, and it lets you identify and reach the sender — which is the point of the requirement.

If you sign up, we store your email address, whether you have confirmed it, when you signed up and confirmed, and which page you signed up from. We also store a scrambled version of the two codes that appear in your links — one confirms your address, the other removes it. We never save the codes themselves, so even a stolen copy of our records could not sign anyone up or remove them. That is everything. No name, no employer, no address, no record of what you read.

Signing up sends one confirmation email and nothing else. If you never click the link in it, you never receive a digest, and we throw the incomplete signup away.

The digest carries no images, so we cannot tell whether you opened it. We do not rewrite the links in it — they go straight to this site — so we cannot tell what you clicked. You have nothing to opt out of here, because we never collect any of it.

Every digest carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click and needs no login. Unsubscribing stops all email immediately. If you would rather we deleted your address outright than simply switched it off, say so on the contact page and we will.

We never sell, rent, trade, or share your address, and we never use it for anything except the digest you asked for.

Who Else Can See Your Address

Two outside services handle it, and both act only on our instructions: the company that hosts this site, which also stores the address, and an email delivery service, which sends the digest. Your address goes to the delivery service for that purpose and no other. Neither may use it for their own ends.

How Long We Keep Things

We keep a confirmed subscription until you end it. We delete an unconfirmed signup after seven days, and the anti-spam records described below after about two days. We also keep a simple operational record of which digests went out; it holds no message content.

What Happens When You Visit

Like any website, ours receives the technical details a browser must send to request a page — including the network address you connect from. The company that hosts the site handles these briefly to deliver pages and to protect against attacks. We do not use them to build a picture of you, and we do not sell or share them.

The signup form carries one extra protection: to stop a program submitting thousands of fake signups, we keep a scrambled, unreadable version of the network address it came from for about two days. We never write down the address itself, and nothing can turn the scrambled version back into it.

No Tracking, No Advertising

This site carries no advertising technology. Nothing on the page reports back to another company about you, and nothing follows you to other websites.

We count two things, and only ever as totals: how many times readers request each page, and how many times they download each opinion’s PDF. Both come from the ordinary record every web server keeps of the requests it answers. We add nothing to the page to produce them — no cookie, no identifier, no script, nothing that could tell one reader from another or follow you to another site. What comes out is a list of documents with numbers beside them.

We can count downloads because the download button points at this site first and then sends you straight on to the government’s copy. That hop is the only reason the number exists, and it is not a condition of getting the document: every opinion page links to the government’s own page for that document at the foot of the page, and downloading from there does not pass through this site at all.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies. Not for reading it, not for the email signup, not for anything. Because we store nothing on your device and nothing follows you elsewhere, there is no consent banner to click — and you will never see one here.

If We Add Accounts Later

We may offer optional accounts one day, with features such as saved searches and alerts. Those would need a sign-in cookie and would store more than an email address. If that happens, we will rewrite this page to describe it fully before offering the feature. None of it exists today.

Questions

Write to us through the contact page with any question about this policy, or to have an address deleted.