Freedom-to-operate Search

Before using technical solution, the right holder should check whether he infringes on the interests of the patent holders. To do this, it is advisable to seek help from a patent attorney, and he will conduct freedom-to-operate search.

Patent purity is a legal quality of an intellectual property, which lies in the fact that a technical solution can be freely used in this country without the danger of violating patents in force on its territory owned by third parties.

The purpose of such a procedure is to identify in a certain territory all valid patents that, hypothetically, the manufacturer of this or that product could violate.

The results of the study will make it possible to understand whether the client violates the rights of the patent holders when he placing the product on the market and whether the technical solution falls within the scope of existing patents in the designated area.

Before conducting a study for patent purity, the specialist determines:

• Object of research. It is the client's technical solution as a whole and its individual parts.  A specialist carefully examines the features, characteristics of the object under study and other relevant factors, and then searches for the presence of resembling in characteristics or similar patented solutions.
• Geography of the study. The client decides in which countries will be investigated the patent area. A patent has a territorial effect, that is, it is valid in the country where it was issued. Therefore, most often, freedom-to-operate search is carried out in relation to the country of production of the goods and the territories of export of the product.

During freedom-to-operate search, the object as a whole is checked. All or most of the technical / design solutions implemented in it are evaluated. The search is carried out for each country separately. The subtleties and nuances of the procedure are described in the “Articles” section.

The result of the study is a motivated conclusion of a specialist about the possibility or impossibility of using a technical solution without the threat of infringement on the rights of third parties in the designated territory.

Zuykov and Partners employs patent attorneys and specialists with a high level of technical knowledge who are ready to make freedom-to-operate search in Russian and foreign patent bases, depending on the intended country of registration and use of the object.