Is there already a Python module to access the USPTO web site?

[Terry Carroll]

I have the need to run periodic searches on the US Patent and
Trademark Office website, <http://www.uspto.gov/>.  I need a Python
module to do this.  Before I reinvent the wheel, I thought I'd check
to see if anyone knew of such a beast.

For instance, I'd like to be able to pass an argument like one of
these:

  an/"dis corporation"
  in/newmar-julie

to http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm and get a list of
all the patents owned by Dis Corporation, or invented by the 1960s
Catwoman actress; or pass a patent number like 4,150,505 to
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm to bring up a particular
patent.

Then I want to be able to parse out the patent metadata, e.g. inventor
names, dates filed and issued, etc.

Has this already been done?

The closest my google searches have turned up is
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/1724 , but that turns out to be Perl
rather than Python, and not quite dead-on anyway.