When an inventor has produced an innovation, she traditionally patents the idea. Patenting allows her to stop others from duplicating her idea for the life of the patent. In addition, it prevents a later inventor who conceives of the concept independently from subsequently patenting the same idea and then preventing the original inventor from utilizing her very own invention.
However, there is an alternative choice for protecting an invention without filing a patent, the choice of secrecy. Using secrecy to protect an invention, the how to file a patent simply fails to disclose the details in the invention by filing a patent application or through publication or any other public disclosure.
Secrecy is an excellent protection when the important invention should not be readily discovered. For example, chemical processes tend to be difficult to discover even if one knows the composition from the final product. The formulas and processes might be difficult to determine, despite expensive experimentation. Similarly, software inventions can not be reverse engineered should they be kept securely protected in the inventor’s own servers.
If another inventor later independently creates and patents the identical invention, the first inventor includes a defense against a control of patent infringement as a result of her prior commercial utilisation of the invention. This defense is accessible when the original inventor used the invention commercially a least twelve months prior to the subsequent inventor knwpez filed the patent application or publicly disclosed the invention before patenting the invention. However, if the use was less than a year prior to the subsequent InventHelp Products filed the patent application, then this original inventor has no prior commercial use defense.
Protecting an invention keeping it secret is probably a risky strategy if one’s competitors are pursuing a similar product development strategy. They may develop the same invention and apply for protection before a full year of commercial use has established the prior commercial use defense. And they are prone to try if one’s own product making use of the invention is successful. However for inventions which can be difficult to discover and this one believes competitors is not going to discover independently soon, secrecy is an excellent option.
An inventor choosing secrecy should treat the invention as being a trade secret, limiting the inner dissemination of knowledge concerning the invention and marking the details as secret or confidential. The InventHelp Invention Marketing should also rigorously document the earliest date of commercial use.
The greatest benefit from secrecy is it never expires. However, valuable secrets tend to be discovered independently and surprisingly quickly by competitors, or they are leaked or stolen. Competitive advantages do not usually go unnoticed and un-duplicated for very long.
