Reference
The vocabulary, without the intimidation.
You do not need these words to start a conversation with us. They are here so that nothing anyone says to you about your own invention is opaque.
- Prior art
- Everything publicly available before your priority date that an examiner can use to assess novelty and inventive step. Not only patents — papers, product manuals, videos, and public sales all count.
- Novelty
- Whether your invention has been disclosed before, anywhere, in a single piece of prior art. A difference of one feature can be enough, if that feature is really absent.
- Inventive step
- Whether the difference from the prior art would have been obvious to a skilled person in the field. This is where most applications are argued, not novelty.
- Claim
- The numbered sentences at the end of a patent that define the legal boundary of protection. The description supports the claims; the claims decide what is covered.
- Independent and dependent claims
- An independent claim stands alone and is the broadest position. A dependent claim adds features and acts as a fallback if the broader one fails.
- Specification
- The full text of the application: background, summary, detailed description, embodiments, and drawings. What is not described cannot usually be claimed later.
- Priority date
- The date that fixes what counts as prior art for your application. Filing establishes it; later applications can claim it within set time limits.
- Provisional and complete applications
- A provisional secures a date with a less formal disclosure; a complete application contains the full specification and claims. The gap between them is a deadline, not a pause.
- PCT application
- An international application that preserves the option of filing in many countries while deferring cost. It is a route, not a worldwide patent — there is no such thing.
- National phase
- The stage where a PCT application enters individual countries for examination under their own law.
- Office action or examination report
- The examiner's written objections. Responding usually involves argument, amendment, or both, within a strict deadline.
- Prosecution
- The back-and-forth with the patent office between filing and grant or refusal.
- Freedom to operate
- Whether making, using, or selling a product could infringe live rights in a given country. Different from patentability — see the full comparison.
- In-force patent
- A granted patent that is still valid and maintained in a country. Expired and lapsed patents cannot be infringed.
- Patent family
- The set of applications and patents worldwide that share a priority. Useful for tracking one invention across jurisdictions.
- Classification (IPC/CPC)
- A structured code system describing technical subject matter. Good searching relies on classifications, not only keywords.
- Publication delay
- Most applications become public around eighteen months after their earliest priority date. Until then they are invisible to any search — a permanent limit on certainty.
- Grace period
- A limited window in some countries where an inventor's own disclosure does not destroy novelty. It exists in some jurisdictions and not others, and relying on it narrows where you can protect.
- Invention disclosure
- An internal technical document describing the invention, its variants, and its evidence. It creates no rights but determines how good the eventual application can be.
- Assignee and inventor
- The inventor is the person who devised the invention. The assignee owns it. These are frequently different, and the difference is set by contract and law.
Note
These are working definitions written for clarity, not statutory definitions. Terminology and legal effect vary by jurisdiction.