When Must I File?
Filing deadlines attach to commercial events, not to legal ones. The decision here holds that selling the output of a secret process starts the clock on patenting that process, and that the America Invents Act did not change it.
It describes something that happens inside an ordinary commercial decision, which is why it arrives earlier than legal advice usually does.
Timing questions in patent law rarely announce themselves. They attach to decisions that look purely commercial at the time: ship the product, keep the method confidential, sign the standard employment agreement, leave and start something new.
Celanese is the sharp one for a company that has not filed anything yet. Keeping a manufacturing process secret while selling what it produces feels like the cautious choice. It is the choice that forfeited the patents.
Other events can start their own clocks: a publication, a public repository, a public use, an offer for sale, a foreign filing. This section covers the decided cases we have read from the opinions, so it will grow as more land rather than list every rule in the abstract.
What These Pages Do Not Decide
- When any particular clock started, or whether one did. That depends on facts nobody here has seen.
- Whether secrecy or filing is the better strategy for a given process. That is a business and legal judgment together.
Educational, not legal advice. Every quotation is verified against the court's own opinion. Consult a qualified patent attorney early, which in this area means before the commercial decision rather than after.
Related
- What recent patent decisions add up to, the cross-case synthesis and the index to every case page.
- Building in public and patent rights
- The provisional as an option on your IP
- Who owns it, and who invented it?
- Minerva v. Hologic, which used to sit here and is really an assignment case.