Why is the price of high-quality patents much higher than ordinary applications when applying for patents? Many companies only see price figures and cannot see the cost logic behind them; I only want to save money, but I can’t calculate the market loss caused by low prices. This article does not use empty words or detours, and fully follows practical logic to explain the root cause of the high cost of high-quality patents.

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1、 Let’s first look at two ironclad facts

A product with a market size of 10 billion yuan has made significant improvements and applied for a series of patents, but the writing quality is extremely poor, with a patent quality coefficient of only 5%. What was the result? 95% of the market has been taken away by competitors, leaving patent owners with only 5% of the market share, and the patent value has shrunk from 10 billion to 500 million.

Another small product with a market size of only 1 million yuan has only made minor improvements, but the patent writing is in place, the protection scope is complete, the quality coefficient is close to 100%, and it can cover the entire market 100%. Competitors are completely unable to break through, and the patent value is fully realized at 1 million yuan.

These two cases clearly illustrate that the patent quality coefficient directly determines market share; The level of writing directly determines whether a patent can truly hold its value. Low price patents save thousands of dollars in agency fees, while losing billions of dollars in the market; High quality patents may seem expensive, but what they hold onto is the entire product line and all commercial profits.

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2、 First of all, distinguish: high-quality patents ≠ high-value patents

Many people confuse these two concepts, which is the most common misconception.

High quality patents: Only consider the quality of the written text, regardless of whether the technology is high-end or the market size, only consider whether it has reached the maximum protection scope, whether the stability is strong enough, and whether the rights protection is convenient enough. The core is legal quality.

High value patents: There is only one definition – patents that can make money and generate market sales. The value of a patent is reflected in the sales volume of the products it covers, rather than the amount of licensing fees, and the core is commercial value.

The relationship between the two is very clear: high-value patents must be based on high-quality patents as a prerequisite; But high-quality patents are not necessarily high-value patents (if the market is too small, the value is limited). Without high-quality writing, even the largest market and best technology can become low value patents, or even worthless.

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3、 What is the value of high-quality patents? It’s not about handwriting, it’s about “writing a lawsuit in advance”

The patent application documents are not technical introductions, but the sole basis for future infringement lawsuits and invalidation declarations. According to Article 33 of the Patent Law, after the patent text is submitted, substantive modifications cannot be made, and one mistake is a lifelong mistake.

High quality patents must meet the winning standard, not simply the “clear standard” or “authorization standard”. It needs to meet three core standards simultaneously, each of which corresponds to high costs:

1. The coefficient of technical problems requires a logical and one-to-one correspondence between technical solutions, technical problems, and technical effects. Not exaggerating the effects, not fabricating principles, and not omitting technical issues related to dependent claims, in order to avoid being deemed non infringing or invalid at the root.

2. The creativity coefficient claim 1 is precisely stuck at the edge of “creativity” and does not include any unnecessary technical features; Dependent claims are protected layer by layer and gradually reduced. Even after claim 1 is invalidated, there are still multiple layers of dependent claims that can resist, ensuring that the patent is’ not dead ‘.

3. The visualization coefficient of litigation should be minimized as much as possible to reduce the difficulty of infringement evidence collection and comparison. Large systems should be disassembled into key components that can be used for independent evidence collection, and complex processes should be changed into easily fixed evidence points to achieve good evidence collection for infringement and easy victory in court.

These three standards cannot be achieved by ordinary agents and must be polished by senior personnel with technical, legal, and litigation experience. The time and intellectual cost is several times that of ordinary applications.

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4、 The value of high-quality patents lies in four incompressible costs

1. Maximizing the intellectual cost of protection beyond the specific scenarios of the technical disclosure document, extracting core invention points, and summarizing them in a reasonable manner, making it difficult for competitors to avoid or circumvent. This requires deep search and repeated polishing, and cannot be completed in just a few hours.

In the practice of stable cost to eliminate the risk of invalidation, 70-80% of patents are partially or completely invalidated in the invalidation process, mostly due to writing buried pits. High quality patents must eliminate all logical loopholes, public defects, and redundant features to ensure that patents are as stable as a rock.

3. The litigation cost of pre litigation rights protection: Writing patents from the perspective of infringement litigation, designing evidence collection paths and comparison methods in advance, and turning “difficult rights protection” into “easy victory” requires a large amount of litigation experience support, and the professional premium is extremely high.

4. The layout cost of patent portfolio: Patent value is never the value of a single patent, but the value of the portfolio. High quality protection requires splitting into multiple patents such as systems, methods, and key components to form a protective net, doubling the number of applications and workload, resulting in naturally higher costs.

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5、 Why Low Prices Absolutely Cannot Produce High Quality Patents

There are three insurmountable thresholds for high-quality patents, and the low price model is completely unable to meet them:

Talent threshold: Must understand technology, law, litigation, and business;

Time threshold: deep mining, comprehensive retrieval, fine layout, not fast enough;

Responsibility threshold: Responsible for the market of the patent holder for the next decade or so, and cannot simply submit the documents.

Low price patents only pursue “fast, cost-effective, and efficient”, which inevitably sacrifices the scope of protection, stability, and feasibility of rights protection, ultimately becoming a useless paper certificate that can only be seen and cannot be used, unable to defend the market and competitors.

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6、 Zhizhongde Ben: Only top-level teams can produce high-quality and high-value patents

The upper limit of high-quality patents is the level of the writing team. Without a high-level team, all high quality and high value are just empty talk.

Zhizhongde’s patent team adheres to the highest admission standards:

The core members all come from 985 universities and overseas prestigious schools with master’s degrees or above, with solid and profound technical skills, combining technical depth and international vision;

All members of the team possess technical understanding, legal expertise, litigation experience, and business thinking, truly achieving the integration of “technology+law+market”.

We can achieve:

Accurately extract the essence of the invention and maximize the scope of protection;

Strictly control the writing quality to ensure that patents have high stability and are difficult to be invalidated;

Advance the layout of rights protection scenarios, reduce the difficulty of evidence collection, and increase the probability of winning the lawsuit;

Build a rigorous patent portfolio to truly transform high-quality patents into high-value patents, safeguard the market, and lock in profits.

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7、 Conclusion

The reason why high-quality patents are expensive is not because of high fees, but because they protect the innovative achievements, market position, and long-term profits of the enterprise. Save the cost of writing for a while and lose the market barrier for a lifetime; Invest in a high-quality patent once and guard the commercial moat for ten years. Only high-quality patents can truly become high-value patents; Only high-value patents can bring tangible market and profits to enterprises.

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——Liu Xinyu——

Practice areas: Intellectual Property, Investment and Financing
xinyu.liu@meritsandtree.com

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