Techniques and Strategies to Conceal a Patent

A patent is a legal protection that grants the inventor exclusive rights over their invention, but in return, the inventor must provide a clear and detailed description, sufficient to allow an expert in the field to replicate it. This principle is at the core of the patent system, but in practice, inventors and companies seek to maintain a competitive advantage by revealing only the bare minimum to meet this requirement. As highlighted by the EPO (European Patent Office), disclosure is an essential part of the patent, but it is not always complete or easily understandable.

Strategies for Hiding a Patent: Terminology and Intentional Errors in Metadata

In fact, several strategies exist to “hide” an invention, mastered by industrial property consultants and patent attorneys. The first strategy is to use particularly complex terminology and convoluted sentence structures, often referred to as “legalese.” This terminology is designed to broaden the coverage of the invention as much as possible, often with deliberately ambiguous formulations. Phrases like “in a non-exclusive and non-binding configuration” are examples of how language can complicate understanding and researching the content of a patent.

Another common strategy is to introduce spelling errors, especially in the patent metadata. It’s not uncommon for the name of the assignee (the person or company to whom the patent is assigned) to contain errors. Some large multinational companies, as observed by Erre Quadro, have over 360 variants of their name in patents, many of which include typographical errors. These errors are not always accidental but can be used to make the patent harder to search and index.

In other cases, companies use subsidiaries, suppliers, or even family members of the main shareholders to patent their inventions, avoiding having their own name appear directly. Sometimes, patents are not registered by the company’s headquarters but by one of its peripheral offices, which can further complicate identifying the true origin of the invention.

Corporate Strategies to Conceal the Origin of Patents

Another technique is to use synonyms or alternative descriptions for the components of an invention, making keyword-based searches more difficult. For instance, a “cigarette” might be described as a “thin cellulose tube filled with a predominantly two-dimensional granular substance.” This type of deliberately cryptic description makes it harder to locate the patent if one relies solely on common industry terms.

Moreover, to prevent patents from being found based on their functionalities, industrial property consultants aim to make the language as vague as possible regarding functional verbs, complicating search engine indexing. It happens that the frequency distribution of functional verbs in a patent is flat, thus lowering the relevance of the patent when searched with a functional query (using any of the functional verbs that the consultant has used as synonyms). Although next-generation systems, like Large Language Models (LLMs), may partially mitigate this issue, standard LLMs are generally trained on different contexts. However, models specifically trained on patent texts, such as Patent BERT, may be able to recognize (or at least try to) even these custom-built synonyms.

Hiding a Patent in the Images: The Hidden in Plain Sight’ Strategy

One of the oldest and most widely used techniques is to minimize the text and shift the actual content of the patent to the figures, leaving competitors and examiners to interpret them. This model of concealment exploits the human brain’s ability to “connect the dots,” that is, to imagine what is not explicitly written in the patent text. If well-executed, this technique can confuse competitors, requiring them to infer the meaning of the invention primarily from the images.

However, it is equally true that, while “a picture is worth a thousand words,” some words are still necessary to protect the invention itself (such as those in the claims). Next-generation systems, like those of Erre Quadro, are capable of deciphering the hidden meaning in images and reconstructing the missing steps in patents by comparing them with related patents or industry knowledge.

These “hiding in plain sight” strategies are used to maintain a competitive edge, preventing competitors from easily replicating the invention or fully understanding its significance. The battle for intellectual property is also fought on the grounds of linguistic complexity and sophisticated disclosure techniques, where the true meaning of the invention often “exists but cannot be seen.”