USPTO Patent data sets are now distributed by Reed Tech, not Google

For the past few years Google has been making US Patent Office datasets available for free on the sites:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents-grants-biblio.html
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents-applications-biblio.html
and others.

But the sites have not been updated since around Oct 7th 2014 and no information about the delay was posted... I rely on these updates so that was a big problem.

After some poking around I stumbled on the fact that Reed Tech, a division of Lexis Nexis, is now distributing these datasets at no charge.

Fortunately the format of the zip files remains identical, at least for the ones I work with.

You can find the Patent Grant Bibliographic Text at http://patents.reedtech.com/pgrbbib.php and the Application Bibliographic Text at http://patents.reedtech.com/parbbib.php

At the time of writing these pages are up to date.

This is good news, but it would have been even better if Google had announced the transition a month or so in advance.