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Prior Art is Far Greater than just Patents | 201 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

Prior Art is Far Greater than just Patents

Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 14 2012 @ 05:07 PM EDT

Public disclosure counts as prior art, and just discussing an idea with
noninvolved entities can void patentability. The journal Research Disclosures
exists just for this purpose, and I remember subscribing and seeing that IBM
used RD a lot. A former employer also used to use them, and we published several
ideas that we thought were novel, surprising, but not anything that we
anticipated having any interest in commercializing or licensing. The point was
to get the idea into the public domain so that we could preserve the right to
practice the idea, if a use for the idea came up later.

This can also be a sticky idea when presenting research at conferences.
Anything that an inventor might want to patent at least needs to have the legal
ball rolling before discussing the idea publicly.

Regards,
mc

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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