Sander Gelsing - Patent and Trade-mark Lawyer, Registerd Trade-mark Agent

Sander Gelsing freePat - FAQ's:

First the bad news: freePat is not available from this website or domain. Neither do I provide any technical support or warranty for freePat (it's not my program, see explanation below). So there are no FAQ's, you're on your own!

Now a bit of good news: it appears that freePat 0.88beta is available from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's roughtly a 300k download (click here).

If anyone else knows of another mirror site for the binary installer, please email me at: sgelsing@gelsing.ca.

Finally for those running freePat, I think that most functionality should now be restored (see explanation below).


The explanation:

You've arrived at my website: www.gelsing.ca because I recently registered the lapsed domain www.intelprop.ca.

This domain used to be registered to Peter Eliopoulos who is the author of freePat. Please note that I am in no way affiliated with Mr. Peter Eliopoulos. If you are a client of Mr. Eliopoulos, please contact him directly.

Mr. Eliopoulos is/was a fellow Canadian intellectual property lawyer and blogger. However, it appears that Mr. Eliopoulos may no longer be practicing. Also by letting his dot-ca domain lapse, all functionality of freePat was disabled.

By simply reactivating the domain, some of the functionality of freePat was immediately restored. One could use freePat and, if/when prompted to download an update, simply click "No" to continue as normal (clicking "Yes" would crash the program).


Help from others:

Recently I received a kind email from another Canadian IP lawyer who forwarded me a modified VBS script so that freePat no longer looks to www.intelprop.ca for a newer version. This was why, when the domain expired, the program complete died. Thank you Jonathan!

After looking through Jonathan's modified VBS script, I noted that the program checks for a file called "version.txt" located at http://www.intelprop.ca/freePat/version.txt and compares to see if the value in that file is higher than that of the user's current version (if so, it would prompt for an update). I simply uploaded a version.txt file which has zero (0) as the value. So now freePat simply thinks that there is no newer version (which is correct) and no longer crashes trying to update itself. Enjoy!

For those of you a bit more technically inclined, I also just now received an email from a colleague in Germany who noted that one can also bypass the update function by turing it off in the registry: i.e. set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\freePat\checkVersion"=Off instead of On. Thank you Thomas!

Note that I make absolutely no warranties or represenations regarding freePat (it's not my software). Likewise I make no promises regarding the intelprop.ca domain.

If anyone knows what Peter Eliopoulos is doing these days, or if you're Peter, kindly send me an email at: sgelsing@gelsing.ca.


Sander Gelsing:

As for me, I'm also an intellectual property lawyer and a registered Canadian patent and trade-mark agent. I'm located in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and help inventors and companies with patent, trade-mark and copyright issues. I currently practice with the law firm of Warren Sinclair LLP located in downtown Red Deer, Alberta, Canada.

I also publish a weblog, commenting on various Canadian patent, trade-mark and copyright issues.


Sander Gelsing practices out of Red Deer, Alberta, Canada
Work Phone: (403) 343-3320     Email: sgelsing@gelsing.ca

*Practice restricted to intellectual property law and related litigation