How Patent Families Can Enhance Your Patent Portfolio
In the world of intellectual property (IP), safeguarding innovations and staying ahead of the competition is paramount. One effective strategy to achieve this is through the utilisation of patent families. Understanding what patent families are, their benefits, and how to navigate them effectively can significantly enhance your patent portfolio. In this blog post, we delve into the world of patent families and discover how they can elevate your IP strategy.
What Are Patent Families?
Patent Families constitute a cluster of interconnected patent applications centred around a common invention or product feature. These applications typically share priority claims, enabling later-field applications to utilise the filing date of earlier ones, and facilitating protection for subsequent innovations within the same family. For instance, if an initial patent application covers a rudimentary version of an invention, subsequent applications within the same patent family can encapsulate improvements or iterations of the original concept.
The Types of Priority Claims
There are many different types of priority claims that can be used to create patent families. The type of priority claim that best suits you will depend on your business and IP strategy.
Continuation Applications
A continuation application is when someone decides to refile a patent application that they already submitted, without adding anything new to it. This is often done to try to expand the range of protection that the patent offers. For instance, if the original patent only covers a narrow set of ideas or features, the applicant might file a continuation application to try to get broader protection.
Another reason might be if the original patent focuses on one specific version or feature of an invention, and the applicant wants to try to get protection for a different version or feature as well.
Continuation-in-Part (CIP) Applications
A continuation-in-part (CIP) application is a type of patent application where the applicant takes the original application (called the parent application) and adds new information or features to it.
This is done when the inventor has made improvements or changes to the original invention and wants to seek patent protection for both the original version and the new, improved version. The CIP application combines the old and new content, allowing the inventor to protect the invention’s updates or modifications.
This also creates the most common parent-child relationship that can be seen in patent families.
Divisional Applications
Patent applications are only allowed to focus on one invention at a time. If an application tries to claim more than one invention, the patent examiner can issue a “restriction requirement.” This means the applicant must pick just one of the inventions for the current application to move forward.
If the applicant still wants to pursue the other invention(s), they can file a “divisional application.” A divisional application contains the same information as the original application but focuses on the invention that was not chosen for the first application.
This allows the other invention to be examined separately, thus providing more protection around more of your IPs, which can help businesses and inventors to remain competitive.
Non-Provisional Applications Based on Provisional Applications
Some countries’ patent laws allow inventors to file provisional applications, which is a way to officially record an invention’s details. This filing gives the invention a priority date, which is like a timestamp that shows when the invention was first described.
However, this priority date only lasts for one year. To maintain it, the inventor must file a non-provisional application within that year, referencing the provisional one. If the inventor misses this deadline, they lose that original priority date, and it can’t be recovered.
Having this earlier provisional priority date can be useful for proving if your invention was patented first, which can be useful in any potential infringement cases.
What Are The Benefits of Patent Families?
There are various benefits that make use out of patent families, most of which are based around utilising the legal effects from the relationships between patents within a patent family. This typically is based around child patent applications, which will receive the legal benefits from the original parent application.
More benefits to utilising patent families include:
Protect Innovation on Your IP
The foremost advantage of patent families lies in their ability to identify prior art and, as a result, safeguard any further innovations or iterations of your invention. This means after the patent application is filed claiming for a feature, subsequent improvements to the invention can be contentious as patentability of a feature depends on novelty and nonobviousness as of the filing date. This can significantly reduce the chance of having a patent application rejected.
Another benefit of submitting priority claims can protect subsequent improvements or variations on an invention, is that it prevents adversaries from capitalising on the original invention’s disclosure as prior art, thus safeguarding your IP rights and maintaining exclusivity.
The reason that this works is that the priority claim allows patent applications within the same patent families to use the filing date of application of the initial invention/feature.
This earlier filing date helps to stop other 3rd party patent applications and products that have used the original invention as a base after it has gone to market.
Identify Competitors in Your Industry
Patent families can be used to identify competitors within your industry, which can be useful if a new company is looking to enter the same market by creating a new solution or product.
As competitors, you can potentially provide alternative versions of the same solution, to the same problem.
In addition to this, it is also likely that you and your competitors share customers or suppliers. By using data from patent families that have been submitted, you can see who is in the space, and how they are planning to profit from it.Another significant benefit is the insight that patent families can offer into competitors’ activities. Analysing patent families can unveil competitors’ plans, innovations and modifications. This knowledge equips you to anticipate market trends, align your strategies accordingly, and maintain a competitive edge.
Another significant benefit is the insight patent families offer into competitors’ activities. analysing patent families can unveil competitors’ plans, innovations and modifications. This knowledge equips you to anticipate market trends, align your strategies accordingly, and maintain a competitive edge
Find Licencing Opportunities or Infringement
The insights provided by understanding patent families can also help you assess if other companies are approaching your technology. If you hold a patent claiming a feature and notice your competitor’s patent family edging closer to your technology, patent families can provide you with the time to be proactive in your decision-making.
Licensing Opportunities
One possible avenue you can go down is to use the opportunity to offer your competitor a licence for its use. This would give them legal access to the technology, which would potentially save them a significant amount of money on research and development, and eliminate the lengthy patent application process. You would benefit from an extra source of revenue, as well as control over the use of your patented technology via clauses in the contract that states the terms of use of your IP.
Infringement Warnings
Another option these insights provided by patent family data give you is to caution approaching competitors against using the feature or technology to avoid infringement issues.
Establishing Your Own Patent Family
Taking a proactive stance, you may choose to establish your own patent family by filing applications for different iterations of your patented feature. This strategic move enhances your position in licensing and infringement matters, pre-empting potential workarounds to your patent.
Patent Family Trees
Understanding patent families and how to conduct effective patent family searches is a crucial step to discovering opportunities and protecting your own IP. However, navigating through patent families, particularly complex ones, can be daunting.
Patent family trees provide a visual representation of these intricate networks, simplifying comprehension and information retrieval. By visualising the hierarchical structure of patent families, stakeholders can easily grasp the relationships between various applications and their attributes.
A patent family tree starts with the priority application or the parent patent, which forms a root node. After that, any subsequent filings are shown as child nodes branching off the root node.
More advanced graphical techniques can be used to encode additional patent family information, such as:
- A node’s colour, size, or shape
- Encode filing dates
- Encode jurisdictions
- Encode the status of a node
Elevate your IP Strategy with Patent Family Searches
Effective patent family searches are integral to optimising your IP strategy. Leveraging advanced tools such as PatDocs and Minesoft Origin can streamline your search process, enabling efficient identification of opportunities and threats within patent families.
PatDocs improved the way patent families are visualised. PatDocs enables customers to optimise their operations, make educated decisions, and unlock new opportunities by combining automation, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. By harnessing the power of comprehensive search capabilities, you can fortify your patent portfolio and stay ahead in the competitive landscape.
Get in touch with our team of experts today and see for yourself how your business can benefit from the power of tools like Minesoft PatDocs and Minesoft Origin, which offers advanced patent search and analysis capabilities and instant international Patent Familiy Tree creation.
Summarising Patent Families
In conclusion, patent families serve as a cornerstone of robust IP management. By harnessing their benefits and leveraging sophisticated tools for explorations, businesses can safeguard innovations, anticipate market trends, and unlock new opportunities. Embrace the potential of patent families to elevate your IP strategy and secure your position in the ever-evolving landscape of intellectual property. Reach out to Minesoft today and embark on a journey towards empowered patent management.
Patent Family FAQs
What is the meaning of patent family size?
The patent family size is in reference to the total size of a collection of patent applications which are connected. These collections of patents can be grouped by their subject matter, and any priority claims that are used between the parent patent and any child patents.
What is the difference between a simple patent family and an extended patent family?
Simple patent families refer to groups of patents where all the documents have the same priority date, or a collection of priority dates. Simple patent families are typically much narrower in structure than an extended patent family tree.
An extended patent family is where all patent documents are connected by a priority document that belongs to one parent family. The benefit of an extended patent family is that it allows for the use of connectors other than the priority date.
A patent family tree can be used to visualise both simple and extended patent families, which can make finding out how patent applications are connected to each other much easier.
