Market-Centered Approach Provides Clear Strategy To Patent Thicket

It turns out that almost any technology can be shown to fit somewhere along a generalized flow from raw materials to finally distributed product. Even services such as that provided by real estate agents are "products" of a kind, with raw materials being listings and potential consumers, and the final product being a closed sale on a piece of property. Upon appreciating that fact, a patent attorney can readily use a technology space schematic such as that shown in the figure below to devise a logical framework for securing a formidable patent barrier (or what is often referred to in the field as a "patent thicket"). The trick is to assume that the technology has a counterpart to every portion of the conceptual structure, and then figure out what would those counterparts must be.

Figure 53 — Generalized Schematic Of Technology Space

The next step is to consider all of those various counterparts as potential "choke points" where the competition could be kept at bay. By way of example, consider the technology relating to synthetic threads. From a materials standpoint there are many different compositions that could be used to make a synthetic thread, and indeed beginning in the mid to late 1800s various inventors secured patent claims on specific compositions for such threads. This is depicted graphically below, with patent numbers of exemplary patents in the field.

Figure 54 — Potential "Choke Points" For Raw Materials

When viewed in this way the reader should immediately realize that the various inventors secured their patents using an invention-centered approach. Any one of them could have locked up the entire field by contemplating and then claiming all the various possible classes of raw materials. That would have involved patenting from a market-centered approach -- but no one did that. They could also have used the market-centered approach to lock up all commercially viable manufacturing equipment and processes, final products, distribution schemes, and so forth. But they didn't do that either. Instead they narrowly focused on specific inventions.

Figure 55 — Potential "Choke Points" For Manufacturing Equipment And Processes

The bottom line is that in drafting patents for clients, a patent attorney can and should view any given invention as a piece of a much larger technological space. He should then map out the entire space from raw materials to distribute end product, figure out all of the remaining patentable "white space", and claim everything that is left to claim. That is the essence of market-centered claiming.