EPO - Discussion forums

Dear OPS admin,

I have a question regarding the fair use policy. I have implemented an automated script to retrieve patent family legal data, and the script should follow the requirement (the script is called at most every 7 seconds -- less than 10 requests per minute per the policy). There was no problem with this script for almost a year, and the volumn of requests for each day should be way below the limit. However all of the sudden (in the past month), I am getting rejection due to the fair use policy. Sometimes I am getting it on Monday, and sometimes I am getting it during the weekday.

My question is that is there any way to contact your administrator to find out how my script violate the fair use policy? I am not looking for a work around, but rather find a solution. I am not sure that the set up on my side may send unncessary requests that I may not know of. If I need to contact you via email, please let me know. I would like to resolve this issue and ensure that I comply with the policy.

Thank you,
Taywin

Dear user,

Yes, please do contact us directly. Our email is available on the website http://www.epo.org/searching/free/ops.html and you got the email from us when you've registered to the new OPS 3.1 version. In your email, let us know your user ID for OPS (in case you are registered user) and OPS request and response you are getting or any kind of log info.

Kind regards,
OPS support

Dear OPS,

Thank you very much. I just found out that I incorrectly passed authorization token in request calls. As a result, your server thought that I was doing the testing and exceeded the number of request restriction. Thank you again for your quick reply.

Taywin