Whats the difference between a Provisional Application and a Disclosure Document?
A Disclosure Document was a paper filed under a former program of the USPTO which allowed an inventor to file a description of his invention with a small fee ($10). A Provisional Application is a “real” patent application, which gets you a filing date and allows you to claim “patent pending” status. And, the most important difference: as of November 2006, the Disclosure Document program no longer exists, while Provisional Applications still do. As a matter of history, the Disclosure Document program was started in 1969. It was a way for the Patent Office to take the disclosures people were sending them anyway, and charge for filing them. They were kept on file for two years, then discarded, unless the inventor filed a utility application within the next two years referring to the Disclosure Document. At most, a Disclosure Document might have served as evidence of a date of conception of the invention. Unlike a patent application (provisional or utility), it did not give you a filing da
A Disclosure Document is a paper filed under a program of the USPTO which allows an inventor to file a description of his invention with a small fee ($10). If the Disclosure Document is referred to in a patent application which is filed within two years, it would serve as evidence of the date of conception. If a Disclosure Document is not referred to in a patent application within two years, it will be destroyed. The Disclosure Document does not document date of invention (that requires reduction to practice, in addition to conception), and it does not provide an effective filing date for a later-filed application. The Disclosure Document was used for many years by unscrupulous Invention Marketing Companies as an inexpensive way for them to claim to have filed a “patent document in the US Patent Office” without going through the expense and complexity of actually filing for a patent (especially when they knew that many, if not most, of the inventions that they took money for “marketing
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