The first of the three requirements we're going to look out in
our course on protecting business innovation via patents,
the first requirement here is novelty.
What does that mean?
It means were you first?
Or Is it new?
Is it a new invention?
Are you the creator?
Are you the the first to come out with this,
the first to patent?
It's about being first,
it's about being new.
The general idea is,
you can't get a patent if you've already disclosed the invention,
if you've already shared it with the public,
if you already used it,
you can't get a patent.
There's more specifics to this but this is the general ideas.
We're not going to give you a patent if it's already public information.
More specifically, you can't get a patent if you've done one of the following things.
If the product is known to the public,
or used in a product by the public,
then it's publicly known,
if public information, you don't need to give a patent.
So the government won't issue a patent on something which is known or used.
If it's described in a publication,
or described online, or presented at an academic conference,
or some other context,
or presented to a group of investors,
it's known, it's published,
you can't get a patent.
If it's described in an application for a patent for
another country or someone else's patent application, then it's known.
But most commonly, you run into trouble with this where you patent in
one country and then you want to get a patent in another country, it's already known.
Now you may say, this is horrible,
I can't use it in a product,
I can't tell it to the public,
I can't describe it to investors,
I can't present anything online and get a patent.
Well, the good news is,
there's a grace period.
What that says is you got one year to get your patent now.
You can publish, you can use it,
you can sell it to the public,
you can present it to investors,
you can publish it or make it publicly known anyway you want,
as long as you file the patent within one year.
If you miss that one year period,
if you go one day passed one year,
you can never patent,
and no one else can ever patent,
because that invention is now public domain,
it's free for the world forever.
You missed the one year grace period,
you publish it more than a year ago,
or your research assistant provides a blog on
the internet and is talking about your invention that makes it publicly known,
or shoot, you got one year.
Now the good news is,
that one year stops when you file your patent application.
And I don't know if you remember,
but in our last set of sections when we talked about process,
that provisional patent stops the clock on this one year.
So you can go one year from publication,
and if you get that provisional patent in one day before the end of a year,
you're in within the year,
it's a provisional patent but it still counts,
it stops that grace period.
And then you have another year to get your formal application in.
So you can't really complain you don't have enough time.
You got time.
You got one year from publication to get your patent in,
and the provisional patent is enough to stop the clock on that.
But if you don't file within a year,
you never ever can patent and neither can anyone else.
It's just public domain,
anyone can use that invention now.
Now, the grace period of one year applies in the USA,
and it applies in most other countries throughout Europe, Japan,
Korea, China, Australia, New Zealand,
India all one year grace period countries.
So, most countries give you that one year grace period,
but there are a few countries that have shorter grace periods.
For one reason or another,
they don't want to give you so long.
So if you file a patent in another country,
you may have less time to file in their country.
They want to encourage you to be quick to file in their country.
Given this shorter potential grace period in some country you might be interested in,
it's generally better to file
the patent application within a couple of months of disclosure.
Three months is the least that I've heard of of any country.
And so, if you file within three months,
you're clearly safe if you file in every country you care about.
And it's generally a good idea to file sooner because there's a tendency to
procrastinate and maybe you missed the cut off by a short period of time,
or maybe you don't realize there was a publication on the internet of
your idea or invention before
you realized you had presented at a conference or in a paper.
The trade off here is important because
the government's goal in issuing your patent is to encourage you to publish.
That's the deal they made years ago when patents were created.
They said, if you will publish your invention for the public to see,
for every competitor to see,
we will give you protection for 20 years,
that's this limited monopoly of a patent in trade for publication.
The idea here is,
but if you've already published.
If it's already publicly known,
why do we have to give you any protection,
you already made it public.
And so, this is the idea is,
if you've made it public and you haven't acted with haste,
you haven't acted quickly to protect your rights,
you must not care.
And if you don't care,
the government doesn't care and they're not going to give you
a monopoly for something that you haven't done your part to protect.
So you need to get your application in within a year,
that's the novelty requirement.
The bottom line, the purpose of the novelty requirement is to
prevent you from publishing and making it prior art,
and then running off and later saying I want to get patented,
or prevent prior art from invented by you or anyone else from being patented.
We want new things to be patented,
and we want to give you this monopoly on your invention and
trade for you agreeing to publish for the world
everything you know about that invention so that they can later
make that public information once your patent period has expired.
That's it for novelty.
Thank you very much.
Theodore Henry King CLARKAssociate Professor
