EPO Amended Patent Specification Watch

Granted European patents narrowed or upheld after opposition or limitation (B2/B3). A litigation-relevant signal — roughly 35 a week worldwide.

Source

EPO publication server, weekly Bulletin publication lists (public, logged-out)

• https://data.epo.org/publication-server/rest/v1.2/publication-dates

Public, logged-out only — no API key, login, cookie or CAPTCHA. robots.txt on the publication server permits all paths.

The four delta types, and their weekly volumes

value	kind codes	measured per week
application-publication	A1, A2, A3, A4	~3,700
grant-publication	B1	~1,900
amended-specification	B2, B3	~35
correction-publication	A8, A9, B8, B9	~50

The volumes are very uneven and they matter. Selecting application-publication means roughly 3,700 deltas on the first comparison run, and billed deltas are capped at 500 per run — so it takes several runs to drain, each reporting the withholding. If you want a low-volume, high-signal feed, watch amended-specification (a patent narrowed or upheld after opposition) and correction-publication.

Kind selection narrows the baselined record set, not just the reporting, so watching B2 stores 35 records rather than 5,767. Because that changes which records exist, the selection is part of the baseline identity: changing it starts a fresh baseline instead of emitting a corpus-wide phantom delta storm.

Fair use

The EPO publishes a 10 GB / 7 days per-IP limit. This actor reads one weekly list per publication date — about 470 KB each — and the kind code is embedded in the publication id, so no per-publication document is ever fetched. A 52-week backfill is about 24 MB. It never requests document.html, and a test asserts that.

Pricing

Event	Price (FREE tier)
Actor start (apify-actor-start)	$0.02 one-time
Source check (source-check)	$0.10
Per delta (epo-publication-delta)	$0.30

source-check ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.10 / $0.09 / $0.08 / $0.067. Charged once per run after enumeration terminates — seed and genuine-zero runs included. Not charged when the source refused the read.

The per-delta value event (epo-publication-delta) is the primary event and is priced at $0.30 per delta at the FREE tier. Ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.30 / $0.27 / $0.24 / $0.201 (FREE / BRONZE / SILVER / GOLD-PLATINUM-DIAMOND). source-check still charges; it is no longer the headline event. Billed deltas are capped at 500 per run and any overflow is reported as a withholding rather than charged.

Snapshot mode is a PREVIEW

watch_mode: false returns at most 25 records, hard-capped in code.

Watch semantics

First watch run seeds and emits zero deltas. A publication leaving the window is the window moving — a Bulletin week does not un-publish — and is never reported as a withdrawal. Any publication id that does not parse is counted and reported rather than silently dropped.

Terminal states

NORMAL · SUCCEEDED-0: GENUINE_EMPTY · SUCCEEDED-0 (no change) · PARTIAL · BLOCKED.

One delta type per Actor

This Actor watches amended-specification and nothing else. The other delta types in this family are separate Actors, each with its own price and its own baseline — so you pay for the feed you want and no other.