How do you locate the product/standard for an infringement search?

Companies and individuals take aggressive steps to protect their patent rights. Most often, if a patent holder discovers that a product or a process is disrupting his patent rights, he might face damages from the infringing party. Such implementation of patent rights is usual in developed economies, such as the US and Europe. However, even India has seen its share of attempts to enforce patent rights.

Generally, one may recognize that his product may be infringing on a patent(s) by carrying out the freedom to operate study (our article on the freedom to operate) and an infringement analysis (our article on infringement analysis). Contrarily, a patent holder might have informed you that your product is infringing his patent and asks you to stop all activities relating to the infringing product. So the question now is how you found out?

Some of the best practices which we adopt to locate products & standards are as follows:

 

1. Search based on Potential Infringer List of products: Based on subject patents, the subject matters expert prepares a list of potential infringer/Infringing products based on bibliography data, potential competitor & potential products based on an open search across similar products/technology infringers.
2. Product Document/datasheets/manual Based Search: The features of claims are searched on infringer websites. Google search, Google image search, consortium, if any, etc.
3. Video-Based search: A open search is performed on YouTube and another potential infringer website to locate the evidence.
4. Standard-based Search: In the case of a standard-based infringement, a search is performed on portals like IEEE, 3GPP, ETSI, IETE, ITU, JEDEC, MPGLA, etc.
5. Product Tear Down: Sometimes, claim features require teardown documents such as for semiconductor/circuit-based claims. If teardown is freely available, we use these teardowns else, based on client approval and teardown documents are purchased to locate the evidence.
6. Image Search: Sometimes, for design search, google image searches are preferred to locate the evidence.
7. Input /Output Testing: In some cases, product testing is required, and we have a lab set-up for product testing, mainly on the software side and marginally on the hardware side.
8. Source code: Source code review is another method to locate the evidence, and we do source ode review wherever possible.
9. Packet Snipping: Sometimes, evidence can’t be retrieved, such as the type of server used in streaming videos; in such cases, we snip the packet over the network for a particular application to use the evidence in the claim chart.
10. Product Sales office: At times, we are sure the particular product is infringing, but due to lack of evidence, we cannot prove the infringement. In such cases, we contact the product infringing company and try to pull out evidence but collecting product manuals from the sales office.

Please feel free to check our patent infringement services page to determine if we can cater to your patent requirements. You can contact us to explore the option of working together.

I hope you found this article is helpful.