Freedom to operate search will indicate if it is commercially safe for the inventor to sell or make your product available in the market in a country where you wish to sell them, with no infringement of the third party rights. For instance, you should sell a product or a technology in the UK with no infringement or lawsuit cases after you for the design or patent infringement when you introduce it commercially. In these circumstances, there will be no third-party rights of the registered forces in the UK. You might clear to sell and make the new devices here with no freedom to operate (FTO) barriers. If there are any currently registered rights in force, you will include the risk of stopping selling the commodity and have to pay the royalties or damages. You also have the threat of being potentially sued and become embroiled in infringement difficulties.
How To Execute Freedom To Operate Search?
Conducting an FTO is one of the best steps you can take for minimizing the existing infringement risks for the IP. The FTO analysis and searching being on the scale of 0 to 100%, there is no surety that the search will be successful and will give you a complete guarantee. The FTO amount that you need to carry out depends on certain factors, but with a simple guide, you can rely on the cost of the new product development and exhaustive FTO analysis and searching amount. If you are making a vital investment, we will always advise you to carry out a detailed FTO analysis and searching at an early stage.
How To Ignore The Risk Of Freedom To Operate Search?
To acquire the required certainty degree for the freedom to operate search, at first, you require getting any related IP. These will be the trademarks, other IP rights, and patent rights that will be in force in the country where you want to manufacture or sell the invented product, technology, or design. You require deciding if such rights will pose infringement risks on you. You can focus on other patents here, but other unregistered and registered rights might also be present here.
There are different ways to reduce this burden. But we will recommend implementing professional help for the task while reducing the missing third-party IP risk and ignore any irrelevant analysis of the IP. The alternatives to maximize the FTO search efficiency depend on the following ways while keeping the total budget low.
- Restrict the search to specific key competitors or the technical field. This will reduce the cost vitally and result in a rapid gain for improving the FTO certainty.
- If you require more surety, you can extend the search later.
- Restrict the search to the countries where you are planning to be commercially active. If there are different countries to consider, you might decrease the search, to the key territories where the protection will be in force. The best example for this situation is if the competitors include no patent rights in the USA or Europe, then are they willing to have independent protection in different national countries? If your product is a medical device, then there is a low chance for this.
What You Have To Look For In A Freedom To Operate Search?
Whenever a patent owner files for a patent application, the patent will get officially published as a pending application after 18 months. This official document will receive an elicit shock that someone has already secured a patent with an innovation known to you for years and is not so novel. However, this type of patent application will never get a green signal to move forward as a grant. Unless it consists of new technologies or designs, it will not get published. This initial process is called “A” publication and is related to the pending patent application. The process will proceed further as the granted patent only when the patent authorities will check out that you include new technology or design. After that, it will then be republished as the “B” publication. The patent claim at the end of the “B” publication will define the patent rights.
Thus you must make sure to differentiate between registered or granted rights rather than an application. However you cannot enforce the applications until it is granted, they might raise other problems since they will cause uncertainty about the protection scope that you might eventually obtain. Due to this reason, pending applications can cause a bit more difficulties than the granted rights as the protection scope is much less certain. Monitoring the patent application progress can be exceptionally significant, and authorities can take action if you try to stop the grant of those applications. In both these cases, we will recommend taking advice from an FTO search patent expert on those rights scope, as a patent claims interpretation is often a difficult task best tackled by the patent attorney.
Summing It Up
The freedom to operate search cost is minimal compared to the cost you will incur if you face an infringement lawsuit. A Freedom to operate search and analysis will ensure that the patent will be new during the early development phase. The FTO search certainty is dependent on the cost and effort associated with the product before its introduction in the market.
It will also restrict your patent search to the primary market. You can also reduce the FTO search cost by appointing a professional, enhancing the product's genuineness certainty to another level. If FTO search finds any similarity of your product, technology, or design with the other product, it will give you enough chance to redesign and submit it again for the application.
