This is an important question to answer because if you are selling a product into the marketplace without doing any kind of investigation, you risk getting a patent infringement lawsuit filed against you.

Initially, a freedom to operate study is something that can be very expensive to analyze. In order to determine whether you have freedom to operate, you have to look at the product features and conduct patent searching to see what patents might cover features of your technology.

When a business brings a product to the market place, they want to make sure that they’re not going to get in trouble by infringing on a claim of another patent.