Patents have a maximum life of 20 years and, therefore, a 20-year potential monopoly. Patents that are just beginning their life and which have longer to run on the their potential monopoly position understandably will have more value. It is rare that a patent nearing the end of its term will cause a great threat to its competitors. It is almost certain that they will have devised technologies or products of their own by then that will not interfere with the patent owners monopoly position. In addition, one has to take into consideration the potential business life of a patent, i.e., the duration, which a patent is likely to be economically useful, if other subsequent patents are providing better alternatives to it.

Essential to understanding your portfolio, is to understand changes in your portfolio over time. Beyond merely counting the size of your portfolio as patents are granted and expired, you also need to consider other accumulation and growth patterns: velocity, momentum, claim quality, claim scope, geographic coverage (international), patent duration, patent analytics and patent fences or thickets. Using our patent search tools, such analyses are easy to do. Let IPstreet.com help you today.

In Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States it says, " Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries."

Let IP Street help you with your concept search. Once you have drafted the description and claims of the invention, you can utilize our multi-word patent search to see relevant patent documents that have similar textual relationships. This document relevancy search can help you have a better understanding of the patent draft so you can appropriately revise and rewrite to maximize the claim scope. These patent valuation and search tools will help you better develop the patent analytics and potential duration of a patent.

During development, IP Street was very fortunate and grateful to have early partners that signed on to use our tools, often in beta form. Through timely and constructive feedback, our partners were instrumental in helping us develop features that evolved from "interesting and cool" to "nice to have" to "got to have". Below is a sampling of some of the enterprise partners who understood our vision very early on. They became annual subscribers and were afforded the benefits of having direct access to our development team, enabling us to design more relevant tools and allowing them to enjoy influence in design priorities. They include: Alibaba, Amazon, Lee & Hayes, PAML, T-Mobile. Thank you to all of our enterprise partners.