Patent infringement check, before the lawyers bill the hour.
Describe what your design does. This runs it against the granted software claims by meaning and ranks the closest ones, so you see the infringement risk while it is still cheap to fix.
SEARCHING ... CLAIM LIMITATIONS · 351 GRANT WEEKS · SOFTWARE CPC CLASSES ONLY
DESCRIBE YOUR DESIGN
~10-20 seconds · ranks the closest claims, limitation by limitation
Paste a patent number (US9589543B2 or just 9589543) to read that patent’s full claims right here.
How to describe your design for the best matches
Name the parts and how they connect, not the marketing goal. "API service that issues short-lived access tokens, validates them at the gateway, and keeps session state in a cache with a 5-minute expiry" beats "a secure login system". For software, name the architecture: cache, sync protocol, rate limiter, model pipeline. Two or three sentences is enough.
READING THE DISTANCE
Close · 0.60+
A granted claim already does what your design does. Treat it as a stop: read the claim, then run the full claim-by-claim check.
Middle · 0.30-0.59
Same neighborhood, different mechanism. Design-around territory: name the part that works differently and check again.
Far · below 0.30
No granted claim sits near your description. Document the gap and keep building; re-run when the design changes.
What the full check adds
This page ranks the closest claims. The full check scores every claim of the nearest patents, puts a distance number on each one, and prints a report you can hand to an attorney.
Screening aid, not a legal opinion. Infringement is decided by claim construction in court; this tells you whether you need an attorney, not whether you would win.
INFRINGEMENT CHECK FAQ
Does this tell me if my product infringes?
No. It ranks granted claims by meaning-distance from your description, which is the first half of the infringement question. The legal conclusion needs claim construction by an attorney; this tells you whether you need one, and which claims to bring.
What does it search against?
The live corpus of granted US software patents, parsed weekly from the USPTO grant feed: data processing (G06F), AI (G06N), business methods (G06Q), graphics (G06T), networking (H04L/H04W). Every claim limitation is embedded as a vector, so matches are by meaning.
Why not keyword search?
Keyword search matches words; patent claims rarely use engineering words. A claim about "a sealing collar that radially compresses against a rotating surface" describes a shaft seal without ever saying "shaft seal". Meaning-based matching closes that gap.
How is this different from a freedom-to-operate search?
An FTO search is run by a law firm, costs $10,000 to $50,000, and produces a legal opinion. This is the engineer’s first pass: free, minutes instead of weeks, and it shows you exactly which granted claims sit closest before anyone bills an hour.