Infringement on foreign
technical property rights
The scope of protection of a subject matter of a patent is determined by its granted claims. The description and the drawings are to be used for the interpretation of the claims.
In order to check an infringement of your development in an existing patent, a feature classification of the respective claims is carried out by us and analyzed whether your object meets all the features mentioned in the claim of the subject invention.
Patent infringements of the relevant scope of protection of the patent in question may be either literal or under the doctrine of equivalence.
Literal patent infringement
Verification if the patent infringement is based on a literal manner usually leads to clear results. Such an infringement is given when the embodiment of your development fulfils the literal sense or meaning of the individual features of the claim.
Patent infringement under the doctrine of equivalence
Within the scope of equivalence theory, the scope of protection of the patent is extended to embodiments whose features, although not explicitly mentioned in the claim, make use of the meaning and purpose of the invention through the use of replacement means. According to current case law, it must be therefore checked whether the substitutes used have the same effect, whether they would be discoverable for the person skilled in the art and whether the person skilled in the art would regard the alternative embodiment as equivalent.
Potential infringements with a third party intellectual property right will willingly be discussed by one of our patent attorneys.