The infringement or violation of an intellectual property (IP) right is referred to as an intellectual property rights infringement/ IPR infringement. Companies and individuals who violate intellectual property rights produce and try to sell counterfeit or pirated goods and services.
Freedom to Operate
Existing and pending patents define the right to create, use, or sell an invention within a specific technology landscape. The freedom to operate is defined by the commercial and intellectual property white spaces here between prior art. The ability of an inventor or organization to deploy technology without infringing on the intellectual property of others is referred to as FTO. When deciding whether to develop, patent, and market a technology, one of the first steps should be to conduct an FTO search. Also, FTO searches can be performed at various stages of the innovation lifecycle to help inform the design, manufacture, and application of technology, as well as the claims made in a patent application.
Altogether, FTO searches should include all existing literature, including defensive publications, ownership information, manufacturing processes, and legal documents, to avoid IPR infringement.
Even if you do not intend to file for a patent, you should conduct a thorough FTO search. In the United States, searches should include all relevant attributes of the technologies in question, as well as in-force claims from the last 20 years. Searches should aid in the interpretation of literature descriptions and patent claims, including dependent and independent claims. FTO searches can also reveal the legal status of a technology, international applications, jurisdictions of interest, and even lapsed and abandoned patents.
Patentability Search
While an FTO search evaluates a technology’s ability to be used, a patentability search determines whether or not an invention is patentable based on its novelty. Patentability searches, like FTO searches, include all available patent literature, including prior art and expired patents. Patenting a technology can be a risky and expensive process in some cases. A patentability search aids in determining the broad range of technical specifications protected by patent claims in a patent landscape.
The distinction between IPR infringement and novelty is not always clear. Patents do not eliminate the risk of infringement, and inventions with overlapping claims can still be patented. Technology infringement can occur when a product is deployed in the market, depending on how the invention is described and how the claims are written.
Patentability searches can help inform the details of a patent application. Consequently, helping you assess the scope of your patent and establishing the boundaries of your future freedom to operate.
When the benefits of patenting outweigh the costs and risks, other options, such as defensive publishing, may be useful in protecting your freedom to operate without a patent.
Patent Analytics
While understanding the conceptual nature of FTO searches and patentability searches in relation to your infringement risk is critical, data can be difficult to interpret.
XLSCOUT helps in conducting comprehensive prior art searches. Moreover, it also helps isolate the most important summary metrics and predictive analytics associated with risks.
Automated Novelty Report
XLSCOUT’s AI-based Novelty Checker uses reinforcement learning to filter the noise from the prior art. It pulls up the most relevant results at the top of the list. To be precise, it assists in conducting a prior art search to help you ensure that your innovation is unique. It re-ranks the results using conceptual searching. Subsequently, bringing the quality results to the top and pushing the noise to the bottom.
Without reinforcement learning, users need to go through hundreds of results manually. By applying this process, users can skip going through the non-relevant results. Then the user can view the Top-20 results for each criterion to perform a prior-art analysis for idea validation. To top it all, the tool generates quality automated novelty report in just 5 minutes.
