What are the limitations of a provisional patent application?
A provisional application will never mature into a patent. A provisional application becomes automatically abandoned when its pendency period expires twelve months after the provisional application filing date be operation of law. You must file a non-provisional application claiming benefit of your earlier provisional application filing date before the provisional application pendency period expires in order to preserve any benefit from the provisional application. Please note, a provisional patent application is not examined on its merits. A provisional patent application records your date of conception at the PTO. Without filing a non-provisional application, you will not obtain patent rights to exclude others from making, using and selling your patent application. Further, an applicant whose invention is “in use” or “on sale” in the U.S. during the one-year provisional application pendency period may lose the right to ever patent the invention if a non-provisional patent application
