Patent infringement
Description
Patents grant inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited period, rewarding innovation while encouraging public disclosure of technical knowledge. When these rights are violated, the patent owner may pursue legal action to enforce them.
Patent infringement can be direct, where an invention is copied or used outright, or indirect, where someone contributes to or induces another party to infringe. Determining infringement requires a careful claim comparison – assessing whether every feature of a patent’s claim is present in the accused product or process. Global businesses face increasing risk as products move across borders and technologies converge. In such cases, multilingual documentation, jurisdictional differences and translation accuracy all play critical roles in defending or asserting patent rights.
Example use cases
- Litigation: Building evidence-based infringement cases or defenses in court.
- Due diligence: Evaluating potential IP risks before product launch, licensing or acquisition.
- FTO: Identifying third-party patents that may block market entry via Freedom to operate (FTO search).
- Monitoring: Tracking competitor filings and renewals to anticipate potential conflicts via Patent monitoring.
- Protection: Ensuring consistent claim interpretation across translated patents and jurisdictions.
Key benefits
RWS perspective
At RWS, we help organizations protect and defend their intellectual property portfolios by combining deep patent expertise with advanced search and linguistic technologies. Our IP Research and Monitoring services identify potential infringement risks early, supporting proactive risk mitigation and strategic decision-making.
Our specialists use AI-assisted prior-art searches, multilingual patent databases and human expert review to uncover hidden connections and overlapping claims. This Human + Technology approach ensures reliable, actionable intelligence – reducing exposure and enabling confident innovation.