Preface

When launching a product globally or preparing for mass production, one question is unavoidable: will selling this product infringe on someone else’s patents? FTO (Freedom-to-Operate) analysis answers exactly this question: it involves searching relevant patents in the target country, comparing them claim by claim, and providing a conclusion on infringement risks.

The pain points of doing this manually are very specific: search queries need constant tweaking, the search interfaces of the five major patent offices differ, comparison requires examining the original claim language line by line, and finally, a report suitable for legal or management teams must be compiled. The Skill introduced below strings this workflow together into a repeatable, executable Agent.

What is this

The FTO Patent Infringement Analysis Report Agent, published by community developer @user_921c36cf, is categorized as “professional” on SkillHub and requires an API key. It chains “Technical Domain Anchoring → Search Query Construction → Patent Search & Extraction → Infringement Analysis → Report Generation” into a single workflow. Users only need to provide the technical solution and the target country.

Compared to directly asking a large language model to “check patent risks,” the difference lies in: the search phase connects to real patent databases, the analysis phase uses a fixed comparison framework, and the deliverable is a fully formatted Word document rather than a chat reply.

Core Features

  1. Target Country as the Sole Analysis Scope. Once a target country is input, the search and analysis are conducted exclusively for that country; no multi-country comparison is performed.

  2. Two Working Modes. Mode A is for users who only provide a technical solution or product description: it automatically invokes @skill:patent-search-query-builder to construct FTO search queries, then executes Boolean and semantic searches within the Five Major Patent Offices (CN/US/EP/JP/KR) via @skill:patseek-patent-search. If the target country is outside the scope of these five offices, it switches to Google Patents abstracts combined with PatSeek similarity evaluation. Mode B is for users who already have patent documents (docx/pdf) or a list of patent numbers: it skips the search phase and proceeds directly to analysis. The two modes can also be used in combination.

  3. Four-Layer Progressive Infringement Analysis Framework. It compares claims item by item following the logic of “Identity → Doctrine of Equivalents → Exceptions → Comprehensive Assessment,” and assigns risk levels (High / Medium / Low, etc.) combined with the legal status of the patents.

  4. Boundary Annotation. When the analysis encounters situations requiring human judgment, it uses markers like [Needs confirmation with R&D] to hand the decision back to the human, rather than having the model draw a direct conclusion.

  5. Word Report Delivery. The final output is a standard .docx file, including a cover page and table of contents. The summary is numbered as 0, and other sections are numbered sequentially. All content is integrated into the main body with no attachments. This is achieved by first generating a Markdown intermediate draft, which is then converted to docx by scripts/build_fto_docx.py.

Trigger words include: FTO, Freedom-to-Operate analysis, Patent infringement risk analysis, Patent infringement analysis report, FTO report, Patent circumvention analysis, Patent risk screening, Overseas patent risk.

Installation and Activation

Official URL: https://api.skillhub.cn/user_921c36cf/fto-report
SkillHub Page: https://www.skillhub.cn/skills/user_921c36cf/fto-report

It should be noted that the official page captured this time did not return specific installation commands. The page statistics snapshot is as follows: Rating 100000, Downloads 1070, Installations 0 (These figures are page values at the time of capture and will change over time). Please refer to the official page for installation methods. This Skill carries the requires_api_key=true tag. You need to prepare the corresponding API key before activation. The specific field name is not provided in the captured data and needs to be confirmed on the official page.

Typical Usage

Below are the input methods corresponding to the two modes, both based on descriptions from official materials.

Mode A: Providing only the technical solution and target country:

  1. Input the description text of the product or technical solution;
  2. Specify the target country;
  3. The Agent automatically constructs the search query, executes the search, completes the comparison, and finally outputs a docx report.

Mode B: Patent materials are already prepared:

  1. Upload docx/pdf patent files or directly provide a list of patent numbers;
  2. The Agent skips the search phase;
  3. Directly outputs the infringement analysis report.

Use Cases and Precautions

Suitable scenarios: Risk screening before project initiation or going global, where a written FTO conclusion needs to be archived; situations where a batch of patent files has been obtained from elsewhere and only infringement comparison is needed.

Limitations to note:

  1. Single Target Country. Only one country is analyzed at a time. To perform a multi-country comparison, you must run the process multiple times.
  2. Target countries outside the Five Major Patent Offices. When the target country is outside the scope of the five major offices, the search path changes to Google Patents abstracts plus similarity evaluation. The coverage and precision differ from direct searches within the five major offices, so the conclusions in the report regarding this aspect require attention.
  3. Risk Levels. The risk levels are preliminary judgments provided by the tool. Areas marked [Needs confirmation with R&D] must be verified by humans (R&D and Legal) and cannot be used directly as legal advice.
  4. API Key Required. Usage requires an API key. Please confirm account permissions and call quotas before deployment.

Conclusion

The value of this Skill lies in fixing the most time-consuming parts of FTO analysis—search query construction, multi-database search, and document formatting—into a streamlined process. Users only need to provide the technical solution and the target country. For parts involving specific conclusions, it uses boundary annotations to return the judgment to the human. Official URL: https://api.skillhub.cn/user_921c36cf/fto-report.