IFEE Submitter Extraction Guide

Priority 5 | Status: PDFs downloaded; manual review for submitter names

What Was Done

Script created: scripts/download_ifee_pdfs.py — Downloads IFEE (Issue Fee Payment / PTO-85B) PDFs from USPTO API
PDFs downloaded: 4 IFEE documents saved to evidence/ifw_ifee/
Manifest: evidence/ifw_ifee/IFEE_MANIFEST.txt

IFEE PDFs Downloaded

Patent	Application	Date	File
11881807	18215352	2023-12-18	IFEE_11881807_LQBEFMNAGREE.pdf
11932607	18384685	2024-01-29	IFEE_11932607_LRZIBLDZGREE.pdf
11976365	18122396	2024-04-01	IFEE_11976365_LUH8OF25XBLU.pdf
11980937	18392663	2024-04-04	IFEE_11980937_LULHPS2QXBLU.pdf

Why Submitter Matters

The USPTO document list API does not include submitter/signatory names. The IFEE (PTO-85B) form is filed by the applicant/firm and may show who signed or submitted it. Finding Goldberg as submitter on these forms would strengthen the transition/control theory (Litman in correspondence block, Goldberg as filer).

Manual Review Steps

Open each PDF in evidence/ifw_ifee/
Look for: Submitter, Signed by, Signature, Name, or similar fields
Record: Patent | Submitter name | Any other relevant fields
Update ANALYSIS_ifw_submitter_direction.csv or create IFEE_SUBMITTER_RESULTS.csv with findings

Technical Note

The IFEE PDFs appear to be image-based (scanned), not text-based. Automated text extraction (pdftotext) returns minimal content. OCR (tesseract) may work if images are extracted first. For now, manual review is the most reliable approach.

Re-run Download

export USPTO_API_KEY='your_key'
python scripts/download_ifee_pdfs.py