SEP Defend
Prior-art defense · standard-essential patents

The strongest prior art against a SEP is already in the contributions.

A standard-essential patent is usually anticipated by the very proposals that built the standard — technical contributions filed to the working group before the patent’s priority date, and routinely missed by conventional patent and literature search. SEP Defend searches that contribution corpus first, then the standards and the patent literature, and assembles §102 anticipation and §103 obviousness element by element.

Run an invalidity search →How it works

Where conventional search stops

Databases index patents and papers. They do not index the tens of thousands of dated working-group contributions that record the state of the art as a standard was written.

Where SEP Defend starts

That contribution corpus, searched in full and gated to before the priority date — the single most likely place to find an anticipating disclosure for a standard-essential claim.

What comes back

Not a relevance list. An element-by-element mapping with a verbatim passage behind every verdict, and combinations flagged by how defensibly they combine.

How it works

Three steps, one evidentiary standard

01

Decompose the claim

The target claim is broken into its limitations — the same element decomposition used to read a patent onto a product, run in reverse. Priority date is resolved and every search is gated before it.

02

Search the contributions first

The dated SSO contribution corpus is searched in full — the technical proposals filed to the working group that built the standard. Then the standard specifications, then the patent literature. All priority-gated.

03

Assemble §102 and §103

Every limitation is judged against each reference with a verbatim cited passage. Findings assemble into anticipation from a single reference and obviousness from a combination — preferring art from the same meeting or release.

The sources

Multi-source, contribution-first

SSO contributions

The differentiator. Tdocs submitted to 3GPP RAN/SA and the codec groups — where a SEP’s prior art usually is, and where conventional search does not look.

Standard specifications

The spec text and its earlier versions and releases — one coherent, dated system to read the claim against.

Patent literature

Date-gated patents and applications by CPC and keyword, judged on their full claims — not just title and abstract.

Test an assertion against the record that built the standard.

Enter a patent number or paste a claim. Pick the standard family and the sources, and run it.

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