-- Furthermore, many foreign countries require that a patent application be filed before there is any public disclosure. Therefore, if foreign protection is desired, any existing U.S. grace period, even limited, may not be available. This is a very complex area of the law and so you should discuss this issue before any public disclosure occurs. CONFIDENTIALITY All U.S. applications filed after November 29, 2000, are published at eighteen (18) months from the filing date (or priority date if earlier). One benefit of the publication rule is that the applicant has “provisional rights” with regard to the published claims. This means that if the claims which eventually issue in the patent are “substantially identical” to those published, then additional damages may possibly be obtained against certain types of infringers for the time period between publication and issuance. enforceable in a derivation proceeding. However, such earlier disclosures may now also preclude the inventor from subsequently obtaining patents themselves on variants of that original disclosure, since it may act in some cases as prior art to those variants. As such, early disclosure should be carefully considered on a case-by- case basis, and avoided where possible. The main reason for not wanting to publish the application is that the invention will be disclosed and so cannot be maintained as a trade secret. After publication, the entire contents of the application, other papers and responses filed by the Applicant, and Office Actions by the Examiner, are made available to third parties. Also, third parties can then submit patents and other materials which they believe
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