When reading a patent basically the only part that matters legally is the claims section. This is always at the end of the patent filing, at least in modern pra

When reading a patent basically the only part that matters legally is the claims section. This is always at the end of the patent filing, at least in modern practice. This is on page 28 and 29 of the filing. It starts with "The invention claimed is". Google Patents has a better format than the USPTO website and makes the claims easy to see: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10599560B2/en?oq=10%2c599%2c560 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10599560B2/en?oq=10%2c59... If it is not claimed in the claims it is not subject to the patent. Any analysis of this patent (or any other patent) that doesn't focus on the claims is not a real analysis. Part of why companies spend so much money on patent lawyers is because good ones know how to write the claims in as broad a way as possible that won't get thrown out by a court. This way the patent applies to a maximal set of implementations. The claims are typically hard to read, the ones in this patent are no exception. There are essentially 3 main claims this patent is making (numbers 1, 10, and 19). These are all separate claims. So if any one holds up in court then the defendant is violating the patent. I briefly read them, but it takes a lot of effort to understand them and my knowledge of ECS is shaky. However, none of them seem to be claiming anything all that novel, so I would be surprised if they held up in court. But to use an expression I've heard somewhere, patents aren't read, they're counted. Lone inventors almost never successfully defend a patent. They were intended to spur innovation but in modern practice patents are used as legal weapons by large corporations. That's why most major companies incentivize having employees produce patents. The companies don't really care what's in the patents, they just want a lot of them so they can successfully threaten other corporations with lawsuits. This allows everyone to infringe on each others patents, since it would be too expensive to actually have a trial. So big corporations are largely protected from patent lawsuits since their competitors are probably infringing on at least some of their patents and vice-versa. The real losers under this system are small companies and individual inventors.