What is prior art?
Prior art is defined by statute (35. U.S.C. 102), but it may generally be thought of as anything that prior workers in the field have made or disclosed in the past. Prior art may include printed publications, conference handouts (and sometimes even presentations within a university), books, newspaper articles – often regardless of where the material was published, where it was published, and in what language it was published. Prior art may also include orally presented material, such as discussions at conferences, disclosures to competitors, certain disclosures to colleagues in a field, and other public statements. Thus, an inventor may under certain circumstances create prior art against herself (thereby jeopardizing patent rights) by publicly disclosing an invention prior to the filing of a patent application.
After an inventor submits a patent application to the U.S. Patent Trademark Office (PTO), the PTO examines the application to ensure that the invention is new. More specifically, the PTO compares the invention to prior technology, to ensure that the invention is different from prior technology. Such prior technology is encompassed within the rubric “Prior Art.” Art is and old fashioned word meaning technology. Prior Art includes any technology that the PTO can use to reject a patent claim. Prior Art can be a perplexing concept. Inventors should understand that their own technology might be Prior Art to their later filed patent application, regardless of whether they can prove that they invented the technology before any other person. Instead, some inventors have a notion that they may safely delay filing a patent application as long as they can prove they were the first to invent. Thus, some inventors, having prepared lab notebooks or other documentation, believe that they may delay fi
