1. The following information is intended to provide guidance to the Georgia Tech research community.
The following information is intended to provide Georgia Tech inventors, especially our entrepreneurial
students, with a very basic understanding of the subject matter to work with intellectual property
professionals and potentially enhance patent coverage. This is not legal advice.
Posters: Intellectual Property Rights in Peril?
Under Section 102 (b) of the US Patent Statue, a person shall be entitled to a patent unless…the
invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in
public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for
patent in the United States. (Note that in most non-US jurisdiction, the one year “grace period”
does not exist).
As affirmed by case law, a technical poster can be considered a printed publication and have a
negative impact on your ability to obtain patent protection if the poster sufficiently discloses all
or a portion of your invention. If the presented information, including but not limited to the text,
illustrations, diagrams, and flowcharts, sufficiently describes the invention to “enable” someone
ordinarily skilled in the applicable field to practice your invention you have twelve months in
which to seek patent protection in the US. Therefore, if the poster describing your invention is to
be used in a publicly assessable setting, and you wish to mitigate risk when seeking patent
protection, it must not fully disclose the novel features of the innovation.
It is foreseeable that the information contained on the poster is not the invention claimed in an
eventual patent application. Rather as your research progresses the innovation evolves. In such
an instance, it is important to understand that as the patent clock expires, the information
contained on the poster and made publicly accessible could become prior art to the patent
application. Where prior art is any publicly known information that pre-dates your earliest
patent application.
Section 103 of the code provides that a patent may not be obtained “though the invention is not
identically disclosed or described if the differences between the subject matter sought to be
patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at
the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art.”
For this purpose, it is relevant to ask yourself as you prepare your poster “would the invention be
obvious to someone skilled in the applicable field given the information provided on the poster
alone or in combination with other pieces of prior art or their knowledge”?
Other factors to consider:
(a) the length of time the posters are to be displayed. Is it more than a PowerPoint
presentation during a conference proceeding;
(b) the expertise of the audience;
(c) the lack of expectation of confidentiality from the audience; and
(d) the ease at which the material could be copied.
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A special thanks to the intellectual property attorneys at Troutman Sanders for their assistances
and willingness to share their knowledge with the Georgia Tech community.
