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Fair use charter for esp@cenet and OPS users
What we offer:
- A free of charge service, 24 hours/day, 7 days/week
- Regular daily maintenance outages are scheduled between 05.00 and 05.15 CET Monday to Saturday
- Additional extraordinary maintenance outages might be necessary, check the News Flashes available here http://ep.espacenet.com/ for further details
- Please see also our Terms and conditions of use
Our request to you:
esp@cenet is the EPO patent information service exclusively dedicated to human users; you can help us to maintain a trouble-free service by following these simple rules:
- automated searches (robots) are not supported
- if any kind of robot is detected, it might be stopped immediately
- the tolerated threshold from any individual user (IP address) is 10 search related actions per minute
- for automated queries please use the Open Patent Services tool (http://ops.espacenet.com/)
- if you are an individual user and encounter problems due to our robot detection feature, please contact us at [email protected] .
Open Patent Services (OPS) is the alternative access for automated queries. In order to avoid overloading the system please observe the following:
- If you access OPS via a simple client and you are an individual user, the same limits as for esp@cenet apply: 10 requests per minute.
- If you access OPS via a portalised or integrated system (e.g. you develop software packages in which OPS is only one part of the services offered), please contact us under [email protected]. You will need to let us know the IP address(es) you are operating and sign a data usage agreement. The threshold applied for this usage is 1 request per second for family related actions (depending on the system load, the limit applied might be lower). Should further operational constraints apply, users will be informed directly.
- If you access OPS exclusively for automated data retrieval (robot), please consider that:
- Robots are admitted, but only as long as "fair" amounts of data are downloaded: OPS is not to be used for bulk data retrieval
- If you need large sets of data, contact us at [email protected], we offer a range of more appropriate means or carriers to provide you with bulk data
- You should send us ([email protected]) the IP address(es) you intend to use
- You will need to sign a data usage agreement
- The maximum traffic volume allowed is indicatively 1 Mbits per second (operational circumstances may require to vary the maximum data volume and connection rates)
- We strongly recommend that you schedule your activity at night-time (19.00 CET to 07.00 CET) or during the week-ends