Political Quotes

“One key issue on which people have asked for clarification is the interplay between patent-defeating disclosures under subsection 102(a) and the situations where those disclosures are excepted and have no patent-defeating effect under the grace period provided in subsection 102(b). In particular, some in the small inventor community have been concerned that a disclosure by an inventor might qualify as patent-defeating prior art under subsection 102(a) because, for example, the inventor's public disclosure and by a ``public disclosure'' I mean one that results in the claimed invention being ``described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public''--might in some situation not be excluded as prior art under section 102(b)'s grace period. There is absolutely no situation in which this could happen given the interplay between subsections 102(a) and 102(b) as these subsections are drafted. We intend that if an inventor's actions are such as to constitute prior art under subsection 102(a), then those actions necessarily trigger subsection 102(b)'s protections for the inventor and, what would otherwise have been section 102(a) prior art, would be excluded as prior art by the grace period provided by subsection 102(b).”