Point PatentDistance at a software patent: cloud sync, caching, networking, ML pipeline. and get an element-by-element match chart plus AI design-around alternatives scoped to mechanisms a software team can actually build.
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Claim limitations from granted software patents: data processing (G06F), networking (H04L/H04W), graphics (G06T), business methods (G06Q), AI (G06N).
Brainstorm alternatives think in architecture, data flow, protocol, offloading, and abstraction boundaries, not pistons and reservoirs.
Verified design-arounds from past software runs are retrieved as precedent patterns for your claims.
Engineering screening aid, not legal advice. Every result needs attorney review before you rely on it.
Software patents get screened with the same three-step engine as everything else on the site, but the corpus, the brainstorm vocabulary, and the casebook precedents are all software-native. Here is the whole pipeline, in order.
1. The claims get parsed mechanically. Only the claims of a patent carry legal weight, so the engine reads the claims section and splits it into limitations, the individual elements the claim is built from. The parser is deterministic: the same claims always produce the same limitations, no model in the loop. Claim 1 gets anchored first because it is usually the broadest, and dependent claims get handled with their proper references.
2. Every limitation gets scored against your design. Each limitation is judged on a 0 to 4 scale: absent, different approach, partial, substantially similar, or equivalent. Each score carries a confidence value. The scoring is constrained to judge exactly one limitation at a time, which is what keeps the chart element-by-element instead of one vague number for the whole patent.
3. Verdicts band conservatively. A claim only reads likely-clear when its weakest limitation is genuinely absent from your design. Anything in the partial band forces a review verdict, because that is where doctrine-of-equivalents risk lives: a design that solves the same problem the same way with trivial substitution is not a real escape. The overall verdict is the worst verdict across all screened claims, never a flattering average.
4. Distance is measured against the closest-practiced claim. The 0 to 100 design-distance score reflects the claim your design comes closest to fully practicing, not the easiest one to dodge. If one claim reads everything but one limitation, the score tells you that, and a mixed-evidence guard stops a design that simply omits a described element from reading as a clean break when the description was incomplete.
The corpus behind the search and the sweep is software-scoped: granted patents in data processing (G06F), AI (G06N), business methods (G06Q), graphics (G06T), and networking (H04L/H04W), seeded weekly from USPTO full-text grant data. The checker itself works on any US patent; the software page is about where the data is deepest.