Patent families are mainly patents applied for in different countries and regions for the same set of patents or a certain technology. The main use is when you cannot find a patent in a certain country;
You can refer to the patent family of the patent for technical analysis. At the same time, if you want to expand your technology abroad, you should also refer to whether the same type of patent family has been patented in that country to prevent infringement.
Extended information:
Patent families have different definitions. The current most mainstream definition is that patent families refer to patents in different countries or regions based on the same priority document. A set of patent documents with the same or substantially the same content that have been applied for, published or approved multiple times by multiple patent organizations.
Sometimes, some people will also extend this concept to include the patent documents generated by all related patent applications filed for the same technology, such as the artificial patent family referred to below, but it is easily related to the concept of patent clusters. Confused.
A group of patent documents associated with priority by at least one patent is called a patent family. Each patent document in the same patent family is called a patent family member, and each patent in the same patent family is a sibling patent family. The earliest priority patent document in the same patent family is called a basic patent.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Patent Family