U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website is *gasp* stateful!

Today I poked around the USPTO website trying to find out what trademarks are out there for ecash/e-cash/e cash. I was cutting and pasting the URL’s to the intresting bits, but then, much to me horror, discovered that the URL’s expired. It’s very hard to collect information about something on the web when your primary source is unlinkable.

Artimage suggested writing a script that will execute the searches needed to find the url I want and then forward the user to the current url. A good idea. I’m now writing webmaster@uspto.gov to find out why they have a broken website.