Infringement detection

Infringement detection answers one question: which products on the market practice my patented claims? It is freedom-to-operate run in reverse. Instead of defending one product against a field of patents, you start from the patents you own and scan the market for products that read on them. Your patents sit on one side, the suspect products on the other, and a mapping between each pair scores the overlap. The job is to turn a market full of competitors into the short list whose products actually practice your claims.

You run it from the Offensive / Infringement Detection workflow inside a new research database. Where the defensive workflow starts from your product, this one starts from your patents: it asks which patents you are asserting, seeds a search for products that might infringe them, and lays down the pages you will read the results on. Give each assertion its own research so the verdict stays clean: one patent family screened against the market is one research, a different family is another. The three steps below take it from your patents to a ranked shortlist of infringers.

1. Choose patents#

Bring in the patents at the center of the case. There are two ways to choose patents: enter the publication numbers when you already know the family you are asserting, or build a query against the global corpus by keyword, semantic meaning, classification, applicant, and date to round out the portfolio. The claims are what the rest of the analysis works on, so this is the side of the database you want exactly right. Their numbers appear at once and the full records (claims, families, classifications) fill in as the corpus is read.

2. Filter products#

Now define the other side: the set of market products to screen against your claims. These are other companies' offerings, profiled from the outside, so the routes differ from the defensive case where you upload your own datasheet. Build the set with a products filter and populate it two ways:

• Search the product corpus, which finds products by their features and categories. Point it at a competitor or a product class and Patalyze surfaces matching items from the wider catalog, so you can pull in everyone who sits in the same space as your invention.
• Crawl from a website, which fetches product information straight from one or more URLs. A competitor's product page, spec sheet, or datasheet on the open web becomes a product in your database, with its features read out automatically.

From each product's description, files, and images, Patalyze learns its features in the background. Those features are exactly what each patent claim element gets compared against, so the more of a competitor's source material you can gather, the sharper the read.

3. Understand the results#

With your patents on one side and suspect products on the other, Patalyze creates the mappings automatically. For each patent and product pair it breaks every independent claim into its elements, judges whether the product practices each one, and rolls the verdicts up into a per-claim score and a risk band. There are thousands of them and you will not read them all; three surfaces turn them into something you can act on:

• Read the executive summary. Patalyze fronts the research with a generated note that states the verdict in plain language, with live links back to the patents and the products that read on them. Start here for the short version before you open the rows.
• Open the products table. Each row in the table is a suspect product, and every patent you are asserting adds a column of claim scores. Filter those columns down to the critical and high bands and the market collapses to the few products whose features actually practice your claims.
• Understand the patent-product mappings. Every score in that table is a mapping: open the cell to see each claim element, the verdict and evidence behind it, and the risk band they roll up to. A Critical or High band on a patent you hold, in force, is an infringement candidate to investigate or assert, not a risk to design around. You can also map by hand and override a verdict you have ruled on.

You can also add a dashboard to see the shape of the field instead of the rows: how the matches break down by manufacturer, category, or territory, so you can see which competitors and markets cluster the risk.

New here? The Quickstart walks the same path from the first click.