MPEP¶

Access the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) for searching and retrieving patent examination guidance.

First-time setup¶

MpepClient reads from a local SQLite/FTS5 corpus, not live USPTO. The wheel ships the builder; build the snapshot once before the first call:

patent-client-agents-build-mpep-corpus \
    --output ~/.cache/patent_client_agents/mpep.db

The crawl takes ~4 minutes and produces ~3,000 sections across all 29 MPEP chapters (~50MB). Re-run periodically to pick up USPTO revisions.

The runtime locates the corpus via:

MPEP_CORPUS_PATH env var (explicit; used in cloud deploys).
~/.cache/patent_client_agents/mpep.db (local-dev default).

If neither exists, the first call raises CorpusUnavailable with the build command in the message — no silent fallback to live HTTP.

Quick Start¶

from patent_client_agents.mpep import MpepClient

async with MpepClient() as client:
    # Search MPEP
    results = await client.search("obviousness")

    # Get specific section
    section = await client.get_section("2141")

    # List available versions (single-entry; reflects the loaded snapshot)
    versions = await client.list_versions()

Functions¶

Function	Description
`search()`	Search MPEP content (FTS5 BM25 by default)
`get_section()`	Get a specific MPEP section
`list_versions()`	Return the loaded snapshot's version label

Common Sections¶

Section	Topic
2100	Patentability
2106	Patent Subject Matter Eligibility
2111	Claim Interpretation
2141	Obviousness
2163	Written Description
2164	Enablement
2173	Definiteness

Usage Pattern¶

from patent_client_agents.mpep import (
    MpepClient,
    search,
    get_section,
)

# Context manager (recommended)
async with MpepClient() as client:
    results = await client.search("Alice test")

# One-shot convenience functions
results = await search(query="obviousness prima facie")
section = await get_section(section_id="2141.02")

Cloud deploys¶

For containerized deployments, run the builder during image build and set MPEP_CORPUS_PATH in the runtime env:

RUN patent-client-agents-build-mpep-corpus --output /app/data/mpep.db
ENV MPEP_CORPUS_PATH=/app/data/mpep.db

The published wheel stays small (no corpus bundled); refresh becomes "rebuild + redeploy".