Patents

With a research database open, the first job is to gather the field: every patent that could stand between your product and the market. You search the corpus, pull in the patents that read on what you are building, and start reading. They are rarely the whole story, so you keep widening until the field comes into focus.

Inside a research database a patent is identified by its publication number, the unique code printed on every patent document, such as US10123456B2 or EP1234567A1. The full record is not stored in your database. Its title, abstract, claims, dates, applicants, classifications, legal events and patent family all come from a global corpus of millions of patents that Patalyze maintains.

How we understand patents#

Patalyze reads a patent the way an analyst does. Give it a publication number and it gathers everything known about that single published patent from the global corpus, then normalizes it so a US, European or Japanese filing all read the same way. The result is one record you can work with.

Four things anchor every record. Its identity is the publication number and the status that says whether it is still in force. What it protects is the title, the abstract and, at the legal core, the claims. Its classification is a set of technology codes you can search and filter on. And where else it is filed is its family, the same invention published in other countries. Everything else, the dates, applicants, inventors, figures and prosecution history, hangs off those four.

Search & add patents#

From the Add menu in a research database there are two ways to bring patents in: search the global corpus for the ones you do not know yet, or enter the numbers of patents you already have in hand.

Search for patents#

Search runs over the shared global corpus, the same millions of patents behind every research database and the Global Patents API. A single query can work three ways at once, and a good search usually uses all three: it matches words, matches meaning, and narrows with filters.

Keyword search matches exact words and phrases in a patent's title, abstract and claims. Terms combine with AND by default, so each one has to appear, and a trailing * stands in for any ending, so electrolyte* also catches electrolytes. It is precise, but it only finds the words you think to type.

Semantic search matches meaning instead of words. Describe the invention in plain language, or drop in a claim or a whole patent, and Patalyze ranks the corpus by how close each patent is in meaning, surfacing the ones that describe the same idea in different words. It is how you catch the filing that never uses your vocabulary.

Filters narrow the field by the structured parts of a record. Each filter is a field, an operator and one or more values, and you stack as many as you need, combined with And or Or. The fields you can filter on:

• Text and Claims: words or meaning, across the whole record or the claims alone.
• Classifications: CPC and IPC codes, matched by prefix, so a broad code catches everything beneath it.
• Assignees and Inventors: who owns the patent and who is named on it.
• Territory and Kind code: the office a patent was published in, and the kind of publication (A1, B2).
• Status: whether a patent is in force, pending or dead.
• Priority date: before, after or between dates.
• Number: a specific publication or application number.

Put together, a freedom-to-operate search for solid-state battery electrolytes might read like this:

Every filter narrows the count, shown live as you build, and the matches preview in a table underneath. Swap the Text operator to similar to to rank by meaning instead of exact words. When the field looks right, add the patents that fit and they drop into your database.

Enter patent numbers#

When you already know exactly which patents you want, a competitor's filing a colleague flagged or the patents named in an earlier report, you can skip the search and enter their publication numbers directly, such as US10629950B2 or EP3324419B1. Paste a whole list at once.

Either way, importing runs in the background. A patent's publication number appears right away, and the rest of its record fills in as the corpus is read, so you can keep working while the claims and dates arrive.

Inside a patent#

Open a patent and it fills the page: title and abstract up top, then the full claim tree, the figures, the family, a timeline of legal events and the patents it cites. Each part is its own block, rendered exactly as you see it in the app. A few of them carry most of the weight in a freedom-to-operate read, starting with the claims.

Claims#

The claims are the patent: the numbered, legally binding definition of what it protects. A claim is a single sentence broken into elements, each a feature that has to be present for the claim to read on a product. Claim 1 stands on its own as an independent claim; the claims after it can depend on it, narrowing it by adding elements.

That structure is exactly what a mapping works on. To compare this patent against your product, Patalyze takes each element in turn and judges whether your product has it, which is why the claims are where an infringement read begins. The full method is on the mappings page.

Families#

A single invention is rarely filed once. File it in the US, Europe, Japan, China and Korea and you get five publications for one underlying invention: a patent family. That matters for risk. A competitor's patent filed across those five offices is one threat, not five, and the family ties the publications together so you can read them as one.

Each member carries its own status, because the same invention can be in force in one country and lapsed in another. For the wider picture, the patent family tree is a good primer.

Classifications#

Every patent is tagged with CPC and IPC classification codes that place it on a shared technology map, like H01M for a broad area or H01M 10/0562 for a narrow one. The codes are hierarchical, narrowing from a broad section down to a specific group, and you can search and filter on them to hold a landscape in focus or to surface patents a keyword would miss.

If publication numbers themselves are new to you, the guide to patent numbers is a good place to start.

Legal events#

A patent's life is a sequence of events: granted, renewed, assigned to a new owner, opposed, lapsed, revived. Patalyze gathers the legal events from every office that has touched the patent into one timeline, so you can see at a glance whether it is alive, who owns it now, and what has happened along the way.

Register documents#

For European patents, the EPO publishes the file: the documents exchanged during examination and opposition. Patalyze links these register documents straight from the record, so you can open the examiner's communication or an opponent's notice without leaving the page.

Citations#

A patent cites the prior art it was weighed against, and is cited in turn by later patents. The citations show what the examiner considered, tagged by where each reference came up, the search report, examination or opposition, with a link out to every cited document.

Description#

Behind the claims sits the description: the full specification, often tens of pages, where the invention is set out in detail. Patalyze keeps it a click away. Open it in a side viewer next to the claims, its paragraphs numbered the way the patent office numbers them, with every reference to a figure linked so you can jump from a line of text to the drawing it describes.

The description is also where the claim language is pinned down. A term that reads as broad in a claim is often narrowed by the examples here, so reading it is part of judging how far a claim really reaches.

Figures#

Most patents carry drawings, and the drawings often carry detail the words skip. Patalyze shows them as a grid on the record and opens any one full-screen. In the viewer it reads the figure for you: the reference numerals scattered across a drawing, the small numbers that label each part, are detected and turned into links back to the description, so a number on the drawing takes you to the paragraph that explains it.

Click any thumbnail in the record above to open the viewer, then follow a numeral straight into the text. It turns a wall of unlabelled drawings into something you can actually navigate.

Mapping to products#

A patent only matters to you in relation to a product. A mapping is where the two meet: Patalyze takes one of the patent's claims, breaks it into the elements that must all be present, and judges your product against each one, with the evidence behind every call.

Each element gets a verdict and the verdicts roll up into a score, so a wall of claim language becomes a result you can scan. Patalyze maps the patents in a database against your products automatically, and you can map any patent to a product by hand from the record. The full method, the statuses, scores and risk bands, is on the mappings page.

Working with a patent#

Beyond reading the record, a patent is a place to work. With one open you can:

• Read the source by opening the full PDF or the patent's description in a side viewer, without leaving the page.
• Ask about it: put a question to the patent directly and Patalyze answers from its text, handy when the claims run dense.
• Map it to a product, checking this patent's claims against one of your products on the spot, the same comparison the mappings page covers in full.
• Take it with you: copy a link to share the record, or export it to Excel with its full metadata.