Products

A product is any real-world offering whose features a patent's claims can be read against. It might be a device, a system, a chemical formulation, a piece of software, or a method as practiced. Whatever its form, it is the concrete thing infringement is judged on: the object on one side of the comparison, with a patent's claims on the other.

What matters most about that object is how it actually works: its features, components and steps, described in enough detail that each claim element has something concrete to meet. Capture that well and Patalyze can judge how a patent's claims read against the product; capture it thinly and the comparison is left to guess.

The product can be your own or someone else's. In Freedom to Operate you map your own product against the field to ask whether it is clear to make, use and sell. In Infringement Detection you map a competitor's product against your patents to ask whether it practices them. Either way, a product is anything that might read on a patent's claims.

How we understand products#

Patalyze understands a product as a structured document, not a wall of text. You assemble it from building blocks, and each block adds a kind of evidence the model can read:

• A feature tree that spells out what the product does.
• Images and files that carry its diagrams and datasheets.
• Screenshots and replays that capture its pages.

That structure is what lets the model read a product well. The richer the blocks and the cleaner each one, the better Patalyze grasps what the product is, and the sharper every claim comparison that follows.

Attributes carry that understanding into the larger view. Where blocks let the model understand a single product in depth, attributes work across the whole set. They are structured fields such as category, manufacturer and territory, and they let you analyze and visualize many products at once, filtering, grouping and charting them across tables and dashboards.

Search and add products#

From the Add menu in a research database, there are three ways to bring a product in. Each suits how much you already have in hand: search the wider catalog for products that already exist, crawl one straight from its website, or write up your own from source material you hold.

Search for products#

Search finds products by their features and categories, running over the shared catalog of products rather than the patent corpus. Point it at a competitor and Patalyze surfaces matching items, which is handy when you want to see who else sits in the same space.

You narrow the field with filters over the same structured attributes a product carries: category, manufacturer, distributor and territory. Each filter is a field, an operator and one or more values, and you stack them with And or Or.

The matches preview in a table as you build. The ones you keep drop into your database as products of their own.

Crawl from website#

Crawl fetches product information directly from one or more URLs, so a product page or spec sheet on the open web becomes a product in your database. Give Patalyze a link, or several on the same domain, and it works through the pages in the background.

Each page it visits is captured as a screenshot, and an interactive session is kept as a replay. The crawled product lands in the doc with its source pages attached and its features read straight from them.

Write or upload#

Writing or uploading is the route for a product you already hold the source material for. Type or paste a description, then drop in PDFs and images such as specifications, brochures, datasheets and photos.

The description becomes the product doc, and Patalyze reads everything you give it to build the feature tree and fill in the attributes.

The product doc#

Every product opens as a document on its own page: the product doc. It works like a note, holding a title, a description and any source material you drop in, all as blocks in one place.

The product doc is the single source that feature extraction and every later mapping read from. It is where the analysis really begins.

Blocks#

Inside the doc, type / to open the block menu. Alongside ordinary text, a product doc gives you a handful of blocks made for the source material behind a product.

Drawing#

A drawing block is a whiteboard canvas inside the doc. Sketch the product by hand, a mechanism or a rough layout, anything easier drawn than written. It opens full screen to draw and settles back into the doc as a preview.

Image#

An image block places a picture in the doc, with an optional caption. Product photos and diagrams give the analysis visual evidence to draw on.

Molecule#

A molecule block draws a chemical structure from a SMILES string. Paste the notation for a compound, such as an electrolyte additive, and Patalyze renders its 2D structure inline. The chemistry behind a product then sits in the doc alongside its other source material.

PDF#

A PDF block embeds a document, a datasheet or brochure, with its first page previewed inline. Patalyze reads the PDF and folds what it finds into the product's features, and you can open or download it straight from the doc.

Screenshot#

When you crawl a product from the web, each captured page lands as a screenshot block. It is labeled with the page it came from, so you can trace the product back to its source.

Replay#

A replay block embeds a recording of a crawled session. An interactive product page is preserved as something you can play back, rather than a single frozen frame.

Feature tree#

The feature tree is the structured outline of what the product is and does, numbered and nestable. It is the spine of the product: these are the exact features each patent claim element gets compared against.

Beyond these, the product doc is a full rich-text editor. Headings, lists, tables, quotes and code are all there for any notes you want to keep alongside the product.

System attributes#

System attributes are the lightweight metadata Patalyze defines on every product, distinct from the features it reads from the doc. The default set covers a product's websites, categories, manufacturers, distributors and territories, and you can edit any of them inline.

When you search for a product or crawl one from its website, Patalyze fills these in from the source as it brings the product in. When you write up your own, it pre-fills what it can from your description and files, and the rest are yours to set.

Category is what sorts your database into kinds of product. Each one falls into whatever families fit the field you are working in, so the product under analysis sits among its peers. That makes attributes handy for filtering and grouping on tables and dashboards.

Beyond this default set, you can add your own attributes to capture what an analysis produces but the source never holds, like a reviewer, a priority or a deadline. See attributes for the full picture.

Mapping to patents#

Once a product has features and the database has patents, Patalyze maps each patent's claims against those features, working through a claim element by element to judge whether the product has each one. Every element gets a status backed by evidence, so you can read at a glance how close a given patent sits to the product.

Each claim is then scored from the elements that count: the share of scored elements found in the product, expressed as a percentage and shaded into a risk band so the worst overlaps stand out.

On a table, every patent becomes a mapping column against the product, and each cell shows its strongest claims, so the highest-risk patents surface first.

Mappings are the heart of the analysis, in both freedom-to-operate and infringement detection. For how one is built, scored and reviewed in full, see mappings.