PRIOR ART
CONFERENCE PAPERS AS PRIOR ART
Inventors love to talk about their work and what better venue than a meeting of like- minded researchers? But sometimes, inventors speaking
about discoveries may find they’ve actually revealed more than
they should have. Ron Kaminecki explains.
Bloviating about one’s work in a professional forum is one of life’s pleasures and a special reward for those seeking to inform others and also to learn from the inevitable questions presented by fellow technical attendees. Unfortunately, if the speaker says too much, it can work against any future patent filings for that invention. Te key is whether the individual has disclosed sufficient information to allow another to replicate the invention without undue experimentation. A picture of a time-travel machine may not be enough for a viewer to replicate the device, but an in-depth discussion of how a black hole was corralled and used as a power source may preclude the inventor from obtaining a patent for the device. Of course, if you did disclose too much information about your time-travel device, you could always set the controls to a time just before the meeting and warn yourself not to say anything!
Because no one has yet been able to redo a talk in the past, most companies require their speakers to have the legal department approve any presentations. However, looking for prior art in conference papers is a great way of finding background on an invention prior to filing, or the names of the inventors, or perhaps ancillary information about future markets, funding or even obstacles.
38 World Intellectual Property Review March/April 2011
Tis patent was filed by Timothy C. Claypole and claims a priority date of 1983. It describes a technology in which the incoming matter in a rotary combustor is fed tangentially into specific zones and swirled within the combustor.
In this case, we look at an inventor named Timothy Claypole, who has a patent for a rotary combustor with a priority year of 1983. When we research publications under his name, we find that he has also given several conference papers prior to this date. In the US, prior art centres around such documents only if they occur one year prior to the priority date, and by this we mean the exact date of December 23, 1983, so a search would have to include a publication prior to December 23, 1982. In most search systems, it is possible to limit the results by exact date to weed out any of the extraneous materials, and a quick search by name and date finds a publication by this individual on the same topic as the patent dated December 1, 1982, just over the one-year period required by US law. At this point, a good attorney would challenge
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