What is a patent of the same family, and what are its loopholes?

Patents of the same family have different definitions. At present, the most mainstream definition is that the patent of the same family refers to a group of patent documents with the same or basically the same contents that have been applied for, published or approved by patent organizations in different countries or regions. Sometimes, some people will extend this concept to patent documents produced by all related patent applications of the same technology, such as artificial patent family below, but this is easily confused with the concept of patent cluster.

A group of patent documents linked by at least one * * * is called a patent family. Each patent document in the same patent family is called a member of the patent family, and each patent in the same patent family is a patent of the same patent family. The patent document with the earliest priority in the same patent family is called basic patent. In fact, to put it bluntly, it is a patent family composed of patents with exactly the same content applied in different countries.

Then apply, for example, to apply for a patent that has been applied for in other countries when there is no such patent in one country. If you know the patent, you can copy it repeatedly and apply for a patent in this country. As long as you have a novel patent, you will be authorized. So the patent family exists in this way, but with the trend of globalization, the number of family members is gradually decreasing.