Expert Articles
Expert analysis and practical guidance on China IP
Design Around While the Product Can Still Change—Why Timing Matters
The same “change the structure” move is a design choice before lock and closer to rework after freeze. Design-around value depends on legal clearance and engineering fit—and on when you start, because timing drives executability. Treating patent risk as a design constraint on the review table is far cheaper than late remediation.
Filing a U.S. Provisional Before a Trade Show—Are You Really Covered?
Filing a U.S. provisional before a trade show does not, by itself, lock in a safe filing date. Chinese priority and the U.S. provisional both follow “file first, complete within twelve months,” but the bar sits on same subject matter versus adequate disclosure; inventions completed in China still need confidentiality examination before a first U.S. provisional. How much of the date you keep depends on how much you wrote that day.
Hundreds of Competitor Patents—Which Ones Should R&D Actually Read?
A searcher hands R&D a list of three hundred competitor patents—and nobody reads it. The bottleneck is rarely access to data; it is a list with no hierarchy, relationships, direction, or conclusions, so R&D cannot use it to decide. What they need first is whether the path is open, where to be careful, what is worth learning from, and where to design around or build their own position. First-pass screening and layering should happen before delivery—turning a dump into a map that supports decisions.
Before R&D Starts, Is a Patent Search About Risk—or Opportunity?
Many companies run a search before a project kicks off, hear “no clear risk,” then hit a patent that needs attention halfway through development. The gap is often not whether a search was done, but how narrow the question was: only “are there obstacles,” not which routes exist, who is filing on them, where the field is crowded, and where space may remain. A pre-R&D search can check risk—and also draw a technology map that actually helps later development.
At Project Kickoff, the First Patent Task Is Not Filing Patents
Deciding “how many patents to file” at project kickoff puts things in the wrong order: the number only makes sense once you know what to protect. Five questions come first—how far others have gone, who the main competitors are, which routes are most crowded with patents, which markets matter, and whether the planned route has obvious obstacles. The filing count is the result of these answers, not the starting point.
Product Already Locked—What Can a Patent Search Still Do?
A patent search after product freeze is not useless—you can still assess risk, test validity, cost options, and prepare contingencies. What has passed is the low-cost window to change the product. Before freeze it is a design problem; after freeze, assessment; after launch, remediation. The sharper question is why the first serious search waits until freeze.