Terms of Service

Patentative is a patent-analytics service run by Futurist IP, an Ontario, Canada company (“Patentative”, “we”, “us”). We are not a law firm.

These terms apply when you use patentative.com, use one of our free tools, request a review or receive a report. By doing any of those, you agree to them. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the service.

If you act for a law firm or a company, you confirm that you may accept these terms for it. “You” then means both you and that organization. The service is for adults; you must be at least 18 to use it.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information. It forms part of these terms.

We offer two things:

• Free tools on this site, such as the continuation window checker and the surcharge calculator. They show pending status, deadline estimates and fee dates from public USPTO records.
• Review reports, sent by email. A report analyses public USPTO records and public product information. It can include pending-status and deadline data, a map of specification paragraphs that may support claims covering features described in a product’s public documentation, and example (draft) claim language with paragraph citations.

Everything we provide is information for review by a registered patent practitioner. It is not a finished work product for filing.

• We don’t give legal advice.
• We don’t give patentability, validity, infringement or freedom-to-operate opinions.
• We don’t prepare, file or prosecute patent applications, and we don’t communicate with the USPTO for anyone.
• We don’t say whether you should file. That decision is for you and your practitioner.
• We don’t contact the companies whose products appear in a report, or your clients.

Using the site, requesting a review or receiving a report does not create an attorney-client or agent-client relationship with us. We don’t represent you.

Your communications with us are not protected by attorney-client privilege. Please write to us with that in mind.

Any claim language you use becomes your practitioner’s work, adopted under their own independent judgment. They decide what, if anything, is filed and in what form.

If you are a law firm, you are responsible for reviewing our work and deciding whether to use it under your professional rules, including the duty to supervise non-practitioner assistance in 37 CFR 11.503.

If you are a company or an inventor, please share the report with a registered patent practitioner before acting on it. The USPTO publishes a search of registered patent attorneys and agents. You can ask us to copy your practitioner on the report.

Send us only published patent numbers, published application numbers and public links. Please don’t send unpublished applications, invention disclosures, draft claims or other confidential information.

If confidential or unpublished material reaches us anyway, we will delete it without using it, and we will ask you for published numbers instead. We accept no duty of confidentiality for information you send us without being asked.

We treat the fact that you asked about a particular family as commercially sensitive. We won’t publish your request, or use your family in a public example, without your written permission.

Patent data comes from the USPTO Open Data Portal. That data can be incomplete, delayed or wrong. Product information comes from third parties, such as a manufacturer’s public documentation, and can change or be inaccurate. We have not tested or inspected the products we describe.

Deadlines, pending status and fee dates are estimates. Confirm them in USPTO Patent Center before relying on them. You and your practitioner remain responsible for docketing and meeting every deadline. We are not responsible for a missed deadline.

Verify every citation, date and status against the source record before you act. A pending application has no enforceable claims.

We prepare reports with software, including AI models, and a person reviews each report before it is sent. Cited paragraphs are checked against the as-filed text. Even so, a report can contain errors or omissions, and the free tools are fully automated.

Support levels such as strong, moderate or weak are our assessment, not a legal conclusion. Statements that a specification “may support” claims are preliminary.

We don’t promise that any claim will be allowed, will issue, will be valid or will cover any product. We don’t promise any commercial or legal result. “No strong support found” is a possible outcome of a review.

THE SITE, THE TOOLS AND THE REPORTS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”. TO THE EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. The site may be unavailable at times.

You may:

• use a report for your own work and share it with your advisors and clients;
• if you are a law firm, present a report or its content under your own name to your clients.

You may not:

• publish a report, or extracts from it, as our statement about any third party, its products or its patents;
• send a report to the company that makes a product named in it as if it came from us;
• resell reports in bulk, or use them to build a competing database or service.

Reports describe products from public documentation and say what a specification may support. Nothing in a report states or implies that any product infringes any patent or that anyone copied anything.

No third-party reliance. A report is prepared only for the person or organization that asked for it. Anyone else who receives it, including a law firm’s client, may not rely on it, and we owe them no duty. If you share a report, you are responsible for making that clear. There are no third-party beneficiaries of these terms.

The first reviews are free, while they last. If the free reviews are taken when you ask, we tell you by email.

We start a paid review only after we have emailed you the price and you have confirmed it in writing by email. Nothing is charged without that confirmation.

Prices are flat fees per review, in US dollars. We invoice by email; no payment is taken on this site. The invoice states when payment is due. Our fee is never tied to a filing, an outcome or your firm’s legal fees.

The free tools are for individual use by people. Please don’t:

• scrape the site or the tools, or query them with scripts, bots or other automated means;
• try to get around rate limits, or put an unreasonable load on the service;
• use the service for anything unlawful, or to send false or misleading information;
• try to break, probe or interfere with the site’s security.

The tools rely on a shared, rate-limited connection to the USPTO. When a limit is reached, a tool may ask you to try again shortly. We may block traffic that breaks these rules.

The site, its design, text, tools and software belong to Futurist IP, an Ontario, Canada company or its licensors. You may read, print and link to our pages. Please don’t copy substantial parts of the site or the tools without our written permission.

USPTO records are public. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners and are used only to refer to their products. Patentative is not affiliated with or endorsed by any company or patent owner named on this site or in a report.

OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE, THE TOOLS OR A REPORT IS LIMITED TO THE FEES YOU PAID US FOR THE REPORT CONCERNED. IF THE REPORT OR TOOL WAS FREE, IT IS LIMITED TO US$100.

TO THE EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL LOSSES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, LOST PATENT RIGHTS, LOST OPPORTUNITIES OR MISSED DEADLINES.

Time limit. To the extent the law allows, any claim relating to the service, the tools or a report must be brought within one year after the report was delivered or the tool was used. Otherwise it is permanently barred.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

You agree to cover our reasonable costs and losses, including legal fees, from any claim brought against us by someone else that arises from: your use of the service or a report; any application, continuation, claim, amendment, assertion, licence demand or lawsuit made or filed using a report; your misuse of the service; or your breach of these terms (for example, publishing a report as our statement about a third party).

You can stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or stop providing the service, or decline a request, at any time. If we stop a paid review after you have paid for it, we will refund the fee for work not delivered.

Sections 4 to 11 and 14 to 19 continue to apply after you stop using the service.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable there. Any dispute is decided by the courts of Ontario, Canada, and you and we agree to their jurisdiction. Before going to court, please tell us about the problem so we can try to resolve it.

• These terms, the Privacy Policy and any price you confirm by email are the whole agreement between you and us about the service.
• If part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• If we don’t enforce a term straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, including outages of USPTO systems or our hosting providers.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours to a business that takes over the service.

We may update these terms. The effective date at the top of this page shows when they last changed. Changes apply from that date. They don’t change the price of a review you have already confirmed.

For questions about these terms, email contact@patentative.com. We answer in writing, by email.

Futurist IP, an Ontario, Canada company, trading as Patentative.