Patent searches have different focuses and degrees of difficulty depending on the purpose. Generally speaking, patent searches include these three categories:
Patent searches to determine whether an element of patentability exists.
Evidence searches
Free-to-transfer (FTO) searches
FTO searches are more difficult and time-consuming than other types of searches. Why is this?
Why is FTO important?
The full name of FTO is Freedom to Operate, which means that we have to confirm whether our products will infringe on copyrights when we sell them to certain regions. Therefore, it is important to confirm that, when the products enter certain markets, such as the U.S. or China, etc., the products will be sold to the respective markets first, and how much infringement risk they face if they are sold to the local markets.
This is very important for the future of the channel, or shop, because when you have invested in marketing and advertising or manufacturing, but there is no way to sell in these mainstream markets, the company can suffer a huge loss. The other main point is that if the buyer is a local agent, such as the U.S. buyer, this can lead to the U.S. buyer being sued, and usually the seller will be subjected to larger damages, such as punitive damages.
Two points in time for FTO
The first point in time: when developing this product, or a similar product, if you already know that it is difficult to avoid it, then you can choose not to enter a certain market, or to only enter certain markets.
The second point in time: when a buyer wants to purchase a product, and an agent/retailer places an order for you to sell to a specific region, it is time to do an FTO, because if the sourcing company states that there is an infringement problem with the merchandise, the person who made it will be held responsible.
In order to confirm whether there is infringement, the following steps must be followed:
Step 1: Identify the key technical features of the product (e.g., features A, B, and C).
Step 2: Check whether the key technical features can be found in patents or combinations of patents containing the key technical features in the selected countries/regions you want to enter.
For example, if the selected countries/regions are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Taiwan, China, etc., it means that the products are expected to be sold in these countries, so it is necessary to confirm whether there is any infringement concern in these countries.
The details for confirmation are as follows:
For patents containing key technical features or combinations of key tecnhical features, can we find individual patents protecting features A, B or C in those countries/regions?
Patents containing combinations refer to whether there are patents containing combinations of key features, such as A + B, A + C, B + C, or A + B + C, and other combinations of patents that have been renewed.
It is understandable that the more key technical features a product contains, the more combinations to be searched; because each combination may have thousands or tens of thousands of patents, and the more combinations there are, the amount of information to be processed is even more astonishing, so how to process the most patent information in the fastest and the most efficient way under such conditions is the decisive point of the company’s competitiveness.
Use AI to Search FTO, Save Effort and Time
Nowadays, the biggest difficulty in FTO analysis is that there are too many patents. If there is no automated way to systematically analyze and judge the data, it will require a lot of time, and most of the enterprises in Taiwan are unwilling or do not have the resources to do FTO.
The patent and trademark office adopts Matrixy, a living patent map, to solve the trouble of FTO with AI robots; you don’t need to search for patents by yourself- let AI robots help you, through the living patent map. It allows manufacturers to systematically analyze the various possible combinations and the problems that may occur in the future, and it can analyze the various regions at the same time, so that manufacturers can know the risks borne by the regions respectively. It can also analyze each region at the same time, so that manufacturers can know the risks borne by each region separately.
As long as the project technology/features are communicated, a global patent search list can be retrieved and imported into a living patent map to identify potential infringement risks and competitors’ patent lists.
In particular, new patents are being generated every day, and FTO may not only need to do it once, if we have to spend a lot of time and manpower every time, we may miss the best time to sell our products, so time is money, let AI help you to solve the complicated things.
Our experience in the industry: major corporations, such as Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, various levels of national universities, and major listed companies, are all live patent map customers.
A little reminder: When conducting FTO search, in order to avoid omitting the existence of high-risk patents, the planning of technical features in the scope of searching patents should start from large to small levels, specifically applying a hierarchical limitation of technical features, and then systematically summarize and demonstrate the risk of infringement.
Work that used to take a lot of time now takes only a few minutes with MATRIXY.
延伸閱讀：什麼是活的專利地圖？該怎麼使用？
