Evidence of Patent Infringement Without Teardowns
How to Find Public Evidence of Patent Infringement Without Teardowns
Claim charts require evidence. Every element mapped to an accused product needs a citation - a concrete reference demonstrating that the product practices that limitation. In physical product cases, this often means procurement and disassembly. You acquire the device, send it to a technical expert, and receive a teardown report documenting each component.
But teardowns are expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes impossible. Many products cannot be physically inspected. Services, methods, and processes leave no hardware to disassemble. And even for tangible products, a teardown may be premature - you need preliminary evidence to justify the cost.
This article outlines a structured approach to gathering publicly available infringement evidence before any physical inspection takes place. It's a natural continuation of our previous article on early-stage infringement analysis.
The Public Evidence Framework
Public evidence gathering works in layers. Each layer offers different types of information, varying levels of specificity, and different evidentiary weight. A thorough search moves through all layers systematically.
Performed well, this approach surfaces compelling evidence without a teardown. The challenge is time: a thorough manual search across all these sources takes hours per accused product. For portfolios with dozens of patents or markets with hundreds of potential infringers, the economics fail.
Layer 1: Primary Sources (Direct Statements by the Accused Party)
The strongest public evidence comes from the accused infringer's own publications. When a company states that its product performs a specific function or employs a particular method, that statement carries significant weight.
Product documentation and specifications
Technical specifications, datasheets, and product manuals often contain the precise language needed to map claim elements. Specifications typically describe functional parameters, operational methods, and structural features in terms that correspond directly to patent claim language.
Marketing materials and product pages
Marketing materials serve a different purpose than technical documentation, but they frequently contain useful admissions. Feature descriptions, capability statements, and competitive positioning often reveal how a product operates. Pay particular attention to materials aimed at technical buyers - these tend toward specificity.
API documentation and developer resources
For products with programmatic interfaces, API documentation is essential. Developers need to understand how the system works to integrate with it, so companies document methods, processes, and data flows in detail. Method calls, parameter descriptions, and sequence diagrams can map directly to method claims.
White papers and technical briefs
Companies publish technical content to establish credibility with sophisticated buyers. These documents often explain underlying architectures, algorithms, and design decisions. A white paper describing "how our system achieves X" may contain exactly the evidence needed to demonstrate practice of a patented method.
Press releases and announcements
Product launches and feature announcements often include technical detail that the company later removes or obscures. Press releases are written to impress journalists and analysts, which sometimes means explaining the technology more thoroughly than standard marketing would.
Layer 2: Secondary Sources (Third-Party Documentation)
When primary sources are insufficient, third-party materials can fill gaps.
Industry analyst reports
Analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC publish technical assessments of products and vendors. These reports evaluate features, architectures, and capabilities based on vendor briefings and independent testing. An analyst report stating that "Product X uses [specific method]" provides independent corroboration.
Trade publication coverage
Technical publications cover product releases, conduct reviews, and publish comparative analyses. Journalists often ask questions that yield more technical detail than the company volunteers elsewhere. Search for product reviews and technical deep-dives in relevant trade publications.
Academic papers and citations
If the accused party has published research, collaborated with universities, or been cited in academic literature, these papers may describe implementation details. Academic publishing norms require methodological specificity that commercial marketing avoids.
Conference presentations and proceedings
Engineers present at industry conferences. These presentations - often available as videos, slides, or published proceedings - tend toward technical depth. A conference talk on system architecture may reveal details absent from commercial documentation.
Layer 3: Inferential Sources (Circumstantial Indicators)
When direct evidence is unavailable, circumstantial sources can establish what a product likely does based on related information.
The accused party's own patent filings
Companies patent their innovations. If the accused party has filed patents in the relevant technical area, those filings describe their technical approaches in claim-ready language. Their own patent applications may serve as evidence that they practice certain methods - either the claimed methods or obvious variants.
Job postings and hiring patterns
Technical job postings reveal the technologies a company uses. A posting for an engineer with experience in "[specific technology]" indicates the company employs that technology. This is circumstantial but useful for corroborating other evidence.
Open source contributions and code repositories
Engineers sometimes contribute to open source projects or maintain public repositories. Code commits, forks, and discussions may reveal technical approaches used in commercial products. Review with caution - personal projects do not necessarily reflect employer implementations.
Partner and customer implementations
If the accused product is used by partners or customers who publish their own technical documentation, those publications may describe how the product functions. Integration guides and implementation case studies can provide useful detail.
Archival Evidence
Products evolve. Documentation is updated. Features are renamed or discontinued. Evidence that existed last year may no longer be available on current websites.
Wayback Machine (archive.org)
The Internet Archive preserves historical snapshots of websites. When investigating infringement that began years ago, evidence from the relevant time period is essential. A product page from 2020 may describe features differently than the current version. Archived documentation can establish what a product did at a specific point in time.
Cached versions and search engine archives
Search engines cache pages. When recently-changed pages are relevant, cached versions may preserve prior content temporarily. This is less reliable than the Wayback Machine but useful for recent changes.
Regulatory filings and submissions
Products subject to regulatory approval - medical devices, telecommunications equipment, financial services technology - often have technical documentation in public regulatory databases. These filings tend to be detailed and difficult to retract.
Documentation Standards
Evidence gathering is only useful if the evidence is properly preserved and organized.
Citation specificity
Every claim element requires a citation to a specific source. General references to "the company's website" are insufficient. Citations should identify the specific document, page, or section that supports each element. Where possible, quote the relevant language directly.
Preservation
URLs change. Pages are taken down. Documentation is updated. Every piece of evidence should be captured at the time of discovery - screenshots with visible URLs and timestamps, PDF exports, or archival tools. The goal is to preserve exactly what was publicly available on the date of the search.
Context
Evidence should be cited in context. A sentence extracted from a paragraph may appear to support a claim element while the surrounding text qualifies or contradicts that interpretation. Include sufficient context to demonstrate that the citation fairly represents the source.
Limitations
Public evidence has boundaries.
Internal implementations - backend processes, proprietary algorithms, database architectures - may leave no public trace. A company may practice a patented method entirely within systems that are not visible to the public. In such cases, public evidence can establish likelihood but not certainty.
Public evidence gathering is a preliminary step. It identifies which enforcement opportunities are worth pursuing and builds the foundation for a claim chart. It does not replace discovery, expert analysis, or litigation. Its purpose is to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to justify further investment.
Most enforcement opportunities fail not because the infringement doesn't exist, but because no one conducted the systematic search needed to find the evidence. The structured approach outlined above ensures that available evidence is not overlooked.
The reality for most in-house teams and law firms is that such work is thorough but doesn't scale. Running this playbook manually against a single target is feasible. Running it against a competitive landscape of fifty companies is not — at least not without automation.
Next Steps
We built ClaimsEvidence as EoU software to automate the systematic parts of this process — so IP teams can cover more ground without burning through billable hours on low value manual searches.
If you're building claim charts and want to see how this works on your patents, we offer private working sessions under full confidentiality.