Palo Alto, CA: ClearstoneIP LLC announced today the release of its debut product and the first elimination-based patent search and management platform – Clearstone Innovator. The application is expected to disrupt existing industry standards and conventional wisdom about patent clearance and other patent management activities by creating an entirely new analytical paradigm.
ClearstoneIP rejects the traditional notion that clearance searches ought to be carried out using the same methods applicable to prior art or validity searches. Instead, the Innovator search platform uniquely ties patents to their required claim elements and presents the elements in an intuitive and functional hierarchy. Searchers narrow the set of relevant patents by selecting elements that are not embodied by a product undergoing search. The software employs a patented method to eliminate patents that require the selected elements for infringement, resulting in a manageable short list of potentially relevant patents. The program also enables users to uniquely memorialize patent infringement analysis so that repeated analysis is avoided in subsequent searches.
The company believes that much of the problem with patent clearance relates to the excessive amount of search results, or “hits,” commonly retrieved with traditional (prior art-focused) search methods, such as those based on keywords, synonyms, and concept-mapping. These traditional methods are adept at amassing a large set of resultant patents, but do not help zero in on the most relevant results. In addition, conventional methods fail to take account of fundamental differences between validity searching and clearance searching – which include the recognition that patent disclosures are almost always very different in scope from patent claims. These differences are at the core of the Clearstone Innovator logic.
By inverting the traditional logic paradigm so that the focus is on features not embodied by a product being cleared, ClearstoneIP’s software cuts to the chase and enables complete clearance searches to be performed in a fraction of the time and cost, generally within one day. Clearstone Innovator also simplifies and uniquely enables ongoing patent portfolio and marking management.