Technical Disclosures

In today’s IP climate, most companies recognize that doing nothing with their innovation is a recipe for disaster. Even postponing decisions on what to do with an invention creates significant, and often unnecessary, exposure. However, many businesses still allow many inventions to be shelved that remain unpatented or unprotected, and at risk.

So if you don’t do anything with your innovation, and your trade secrets are unsuitable for widespread application, will you be forced to patent all your innovations, regardless of the cost?

Fortunately, there is another way. Technical disclosure provides an inexpensive means to protect your freedom to practice your innovation, effectively reducing the significant cost of patenting and removing the huge risks of doing nothing.

What is a technical disclosure? Quite simply, it is the intentional and purposeful publication of innovation into the public domain. Thus, technical disclosures create prior art. Prior art can prevent a related patent from issuing based on the typical requirements, which demand that a patentable innovation be new and non-obvious. With a technical disclosure, your competitor cannot patent the invention, and you retain your freedom to practice your innovation. Technical disclosures do not completely replace patenting, since they do not provide any exclusive rights. But through the judicious use of patents, and the informed employment of technical disclosures, you can reduce expenditures related to patenting and at the same time you increase the scope of your protected IP.

Working with our partner – www.IP.com – we ensure that peripheral inventions based on your core patents, trademarks, and copyrights are published so that others may not practice or exclude you from practicing the invention or inventive concept.

To publish your technical disclosure and to determine which IP strategy is appropriate for your company, contact us.

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