Do not screw this up!

摘要

If you have been keeping up on the America Invents Act (AIA) for at least a year, then you filed as many patent applications as you could before the 16 March 2013 deadline, when the AIA went into full effect. In so doing, you held on to all the defences against various forms of prior art, both foreign and domestic, that are available to patents filed under the old pre-AIA patent law. Among the most important: 1. If your invention was known or used by someone in a foreign country before you invented or filed for your invention, that is their problem, not yours. It is not prior art. 2. A set of grace periods immunise you from various disclosures as long as they occurred within a year before your filing date. These protections are now lost in the AIA and it is a scary thought that someone out there, anywhere in the world, may come forward with evidence to prove your application is worthless. This, in a world where the technologies to create fraudulent documentation improve and become more widely available every day.