The Google patent search is a very useful for studying GPS technology, precision oscillators, etc. It has been extremely reliable in the past, but today it started giving an error message after downloading only 5 patents. The error message is: Google Error Forbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL /patents/download/xxx.pdf?id=yyyy from this server. Rebooting and clearing the cookies didn't help. I have a static IP, so Google knows when I am trying to download a patent, and it gives this error message instead. There are a few other free patent services, but they require logging on, they aren't as easy to use, and they don't have the search options that google has. They also give larger pdf files than google. For example, here is US patent #6134065 by an old friend, Steve Brittenham, who used to work at HP Boisie: Service Bytes FreePatent : 80,794 Wikipatent : 543,465 Google : 66,014 The urls are http://www.freepatentsonline.com/ http://www.wikipatents.com/ Another service I often use is www.pat2pdf.org, but it seems to be offline today. So the best option is still google, but how to get around the static ip problem? The solution is a free proxy. There are many on the web - this one works fine: http://www.freeproxysite.com/ I used the "TOP 10 proxies by clicks", and selected German-Proxy.de From there, I went to http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search?hl=en&num=30 entered a patent number, and downloaded it with no problems. I don't know what is causing the problem at google, but this appears to solve it. If you run into this and find it starts giving problems again, just select another proxy and continue working! Mike