Tim Uy at Stanford emailed about his newest venture — onCloud8. You can download patents and applications for 88 cents a pop.
I don’t know how Tim obtains the raw patents data. Those who are planning to download from the USPTO in quantity should beware. I have a friend who set up a perl script to download about 300,000 patents — the USPTO eventually blocked his IP addresses. They have a policy against excessive downloading.
These databases are intended for use by the general public. Due to limitations of equipment and bandwidth, they are not intended to be a source for bulk downloads of USPTO data. Bulk data may be purchased from USPTO at cost (see the USPTO Products and Services Catalog). Individuals, companies, IP addresses, or blocks of IP addresses who, in effect, deny service to the general public by generating unusually high numbers (1000 or more) of daily database accesses (searches, pages, or hits), whether generated manually or in an automated fashion, may be denied access to these servers without notice.
“At cost” may be a bit shocking. For example, 2004 patent application data for 2004 has a cost of $37,800. (Pricelist)
Update: Tim is a graduate student in applied physics, and his data is not coming from the USPTO site. If you have specific requests, he may be able to work with you. email Tim.