Home / Freedom to operate: risk analysis, not a guarantee
FTO asks whether making, using or selling a product risks infringing in-force patents in a market. It differs from patentability — your invention can be patentable and still infringe.
Patentability looks backward at prior art and asks whether an invention deserves a patent. FTO looks sideways at live claims and asks whether a product may practice someone else’s. Teams need both, run separately, because they answer different questions with different evidence — a clean novelty search says nothing about infringement risk.
FTO is per-market and per-date: a product clear in one jurisdiction may be blocked in another, and every conclusion expires as new applications publish and claims amend. SallyIP scopes each project to its markets, dates conclusions, and re-runs mappings against fresh evidence rather than editing old verdicts.
Flagged mappings carry review states and, where possible, documented design-around alternatives — engineering changes that step outside the mapped limitation, recorded with the same evidence trail as the flag itself. Re-run triggers are explicit: new launch market, new product feature, eighteen months since the last snapshot, or any newly published application in the space. An FTO opinion without a re-run policy is a snapshot sold as a guarantee.
FTO sits between product and counsel: engineers decompose features, counsel judges mappings, and leadership owns the residual risk. It runs before launch commitments, before fundraising technical diligence, and before entering new markets — late enough that the product is concrete, early enough that a redesign is still affordable. SallyIP projects mirror that timing with matter-scoped evidence both sides can inspect.
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