A cloud communications company building out its Rich Communication Services (RCS) product line needed a patent clearance picture of its services before deployment scaled further. The objective was specific: identify which functionalities carried freedom-to-operate risk and where design-around paths existed for each.
Patent risk did not follow the protocol name. It sat inside individual functions, and the patents covering those functions often never used “RCS” in their titles, abstracts, or claims. A keyword search built on the protocol acronym would have produced a risk record that looked cleaner than the actual situation warranted. GreyB started from the product’s feature set, evaluating overlapping patents through claim language rather than keyword matching.
Building a Functionality-First Feature Taxonomy Across 7 RCS Product Lines
GreyB designed the assessment framework around three questions: which functionalities carry the highest exposure, where design-around options exist, and which of the 10 most-litigated companies with comparable products hold patents worth monitoring.
To answer these, GreyB built a product-to-feature taxonomy covering seven RCS product lines, broken into functional layers: messaging, scheduling, broadcasting, interactive features, channel handling, security, analytics, chatbot capabilities, and routing. The scope extended to next-generation capabilities including generative AI, blockchain, and natural language processing.
Two additional node categories extended the taxonomy beyond the client’s current product set.
Whitespace nodes covered functions the client did not yet offer, including SIM-swap protection, spam protection, financing features, and calling over RCS. These served as opportunity markers rather than risk flags, areas where prior art was thinner or absent.
Integration nodes covered functions that became relevant when RCS operated alongside the client’s wider product portfolio: conversation locking, notifications, discoverability, message status tracking, text-to-speech, and caller identification.
A fixed taxonomy gave every patent a defined location in the product map. Similar disclosures could be compared within the same reference frame throughout the analysis.
Combining Three Independent Approaches
Many relevant patents reference RCS only within background descriptions while structuring claims around the underlying function, covering the same behavior across multiple messaging protocols. A search restricted to RCS terminology would have excluded that entire category from the analysis.
Three search approaches ran in parallel:
- Feature-restricted searches combined specific client functionalities with RCS full-text records.Â
- Broad functionality searches scanned for features appearing in patent claims even when the protocol appeared only in the description body, covering SMS and MMS alongside RCS.Â
- Litigation-led searches focused on the 10 most-litigated companies with overlapping functionality, to identify patent owners with a pattern of assertion that keyword searches would have missed.
The three approaches were complementary. Running them in parallel reduced the chance that any category of relevant patent would pass undetected.
Claim-Level Risk Grading Converted Patent Records Into Actionable FTO Insights
The risk assessment focused on how patent claims were structured, not on whether a patent mentioned RCS.
The grading produced three categories:
- High risk: the patent focused on RCS and connected an RCS-exclusive function with a broad feature of the client’s product within an independent claim.Â
- Medium risk: the overlap existed, but the relevant broad feature appeared within a dependent claim.Â
- Low risk: the function was not exclusive to RCS and operated across multiple communication channels, limiting the scope of any potential enforcement action.
The team tagged all final classifications manually. Claim-level misclassification produces compounding errors as the patent record grows, and automated classification at this level of specificity is not reliable enough for decisions with legal consequences.
The Risk Map Also Revealed Whitespace and Integration Opportunities
Although the detailed risk findings remain confidential, the directional outcomes of the methodology are not.
Because GreyB fixed the taxonomy before the search began, the same framework that mapped risk also surfaced adjacent opportunities. The whitespace nodes identified areas where the client could build new features with less exposure to existing patents. The integration nodes clarified which cross-product functions warranted closer examination when RCS combined with the client’s other services.
A meaningful share of relevant records came from broad-functionality and litigation-led searches rather than RCS-specific queries. Those patents would not have appeared in a keyword-restricted search, and their absence would have left gaps in the risk picture that product and legal teams relied on.
Cross-Protocol Messaging Knowledge Prevented Blind Spots in the Patent Record
RCS, SMS, and MMS share underlying functionality in ways that carry patent implications. A patent structured around SMS message delivery logic can still carry enforceable claim scope over an equivalent RCS implementation of the same function.
Several patents relevant to this assessment referenced RCS only in their background sections, with claims broad enough to cover the function regardless of protocol. Telecom operators, network equipment vendors, and messaging platforms each contributed relevant prior art. Limiting the search to direct competitors would have left substantial portions of the patent record unexamined.
How Companies Can Identify Genuine Patent Exposure Across RCS Features
Patent clearance in messaging technologies fails when the search starts from terminology rather than functionality. The question that matters is how much of the underlying feature behavior falls within enforceable claim scope, not which patents name the product in their title.
GreyB builds freedom-to-operate assessments for product and IP teams through functionality-first taxonomies, multi-angle patent searching, and manual claim grading. The process identifies exposure, surfaces design-around options, and maps areas where development can proceed with lower risk.
If your team is building or scaling RCS capabilities and needs a clear view of where the patent exposure sits, contact us to discuss the scope.
