Right to Use / Freedom to Operate Search

Right to Use Search is also called Freedom to Operate (FTO) or Freedom to Practice (FTP) search, which is a service in order to give clients an answer, if it is safe to produce or market a product or use a production technology without infringing or violating third party patent or other intellectual property rights. Therefore, some people also call it Clearance Search or Infringement Search.

Our FTO search includes a comprehensive search for unexpired Japanese granted patents and pending patent applications. We can also perform FTO search in Chinese or Korean if your target market is China or Korean. We can get detailed legal status information including file history/file wrapper for a specific patent.

The search we perform is aimed to determine if a specific product or method has freedom to operate in any particular country such as in Japan, China, Korean or other Asian countries or regions.

In a FTO project, we have following steps:

• Understand and Analysis of the technology or product the client is planning to market or produce;
• Conduct a patent search in Japanese or Chinese or Korean depending on the country to be entered and collects all accessible information about valid granted or pending patents;
• Screen and review the hits produced in the search, and compare the claimed features and the product features;
• Summarize and report.