What public disclosure does to your patent rights

What disclosure means in patent law (operator’s read)

I’m an operator, not a lawyer. I’ve had to make the call on this enough times that I learned the rules the way you learn rules when getting them wrong is expensive. Here’s the operator’s read.

In patent law, a public disclosure is any non-confidential conveying of the invention to someone outside the company. Publishing a paper is a disclosure. So is a trade-show demo. So is posting on a public repo. So is pitching investors without a signed NDA. And — this is the one most founders miss — pasting proprietary method detail into a consumer-tier LLM is also a disclosure, because the terms on those tools allow training and don’t guarantee confidentiality.

The bar is lower than the instinct. The instinct says “disclosure” means press release. The doctrine says disclosure is anythingnon-confidential. Showing your method to a friend who didn’t sign an NDA is a disclosure. So is a conversation at a conference. So is a single screenshot in a public Slack.

Why it matters: the moment a disclosure happens, your patent clocks change. In the US you get a one-year grace period to file. In most of the rest of the world — Europe, China, most absolute-novelty jurisdictions — you lose the right to patent in those countries the moment the disclosure goes public. That second one is the one that quietly kills most early-stage IP strategies.

The story

The first time I really internalized this, I was about to give a demo to a venue partner. I’d been talking to them under a soft handshake — no NDA in place because we’d known each other a while and it felt like overkill. The demo was going to be in their facility, in front of their staff, including a couple of vendors they worked with.

I caught it about a week before. Vendors I didn’t know, no confidentiality framework, novel method, no filing on file. Walking into that room would have been a public disclosure to people I couldn’t bind retroactively. US grace period starts immediately; foreign rights gone the moment any of those vendors stepped out the door.

The fix was small. Signed NDAs in place 48 hours before the demo with every named attendee. A provisional patent application filed three days before. Total cost: a few hours of paperwork and ~$130 in USPTO fees. The cost of having skipped that step is harder to quantify because foreign patent rights, once gone, are gone — there’s no salvage path.

After that, the rule got mechanical. Nothing about a patentable method goes public — including to anyone outside the cap table — until a provisional is on file and NDAs are signed.That’s a checkpoint, not a vibe.

Three quiet disclosures

The three disclosure paths that don’t feel like disclosure. Hover any card to see what to actually do.

Common thread: none of these feel like “publishing.”The pitch is private. The LLM prompt is private. The blog post is just marketing. But each one is non-confidential transfer to outsiders — that’s the doctrinal definition of disclosure, regardless of how it feels.

The grace-period trap

The US has a one-year grace period: from the date of your first public disclosure, you have 12 months to file a US patent application. That’s generous, and it’s the reason a lot of early-stage US founders never feel the pain — they keep their disclosures domestic and file within the year.

The trap shows up the moment you want to file internationally. Europe and China run on absolute novelty. If you publish, demo, or otherwise disclose before filing, you lose the right to patent in those jurisdictions immediately and permanently. There’s no grace period to recover into. Canada and Japan have limited grace periods, but they typically require filing within one year of the disclosure rather than within one year of your priority date — which is a meaningfully tighter constraint than the US version.

The practical implication: if international patent rights matter to your business — which is almost always the case for hardware, consumer products, B2B SaaS sold to global customers, anything with a global market — then the order matters. File first, disclose second. Reversing those two steps forfeits the foreign filings.

The cheapest version of “file first” is a US provisional patent application. It costs ~$130 in USPTO fees for a micro-entity. It buys you a priority date that’s recognized by most foreign patent offices under the Paris Convention. From the moment the provisional is on file, you can disclose freely — pitches, demos, papers, posts — and still have 12 months to convert to a non-provisional and to file foreign equivalents off your priority date.

If a method is going to be patentable and global, the math almost always favors the provisional. The cost of filing is much smaller than the cost of losing foreign rights. The decision rule is: before any non-confidential disclosure that touches a novel method, a provisional is on file.

Annotated transcript

A real conversation — operator about to demo at a venue, hasn’t filed anything yet, walking through what counts as disclosure and what to do before the demo. Click any pinned annotation for commentary.

The IP review gate

The reason most disclosure problems happen isn’t that the operator didn’t know the rules. It’s that nobody was the named gatekeeper, so a pitch deck went out, a blog post went up, a prompt got pasted into ChatGPT, and the disclosure happened in the gap between “everyone knows we should be careful” and “one specific person reviews this before it ships.”

The fix is structural: name one IP reviewer and wire them into the workflow as a real checkpoint.Not “the team is careful.” One human (or one agent that escalates to a human) whose signoff is required before any of these artifacts go out:

• Pitch decks shared outside the cap table.
• Customer or partner demos where outsiders can observe the system.
• Blog posts, papers, conference talks, podcast appearances, README updates that describe method detail.
• Public repos and any code being pushed to a non-private destination.
• Marketing pages on the company site that describe how the product works.

The reviewer’s job is small: run the pre-publish check (below), call out anything that’s a disclosure of a patentable method, confirm filings are in place or get them in place. Not a legal review — an operator-level check that the order of operations is right.

The companion failure to the disclosure gate is the consumer-LLM gate. Same idea, different surface. Proprietary code, method detail, training data, and business strategy only ever touch enterprise-tier tools with a signed DPA that prohibits training on inputs. Consumer tools get scrubbed inputs — describe the shape of the problem, not the secret sauce. Samsung banned ChatGPT internally after engineers leaked source code into it; the right move is to set the rule before that incident happens, not after.

The pre-publish check — five questions

Before anything about a patentable method goes outside the company, the named reviewer walks these five questions:

1. Is anyone seeing this who hasn’t signed an NDA? If yes, either get the NDA signed first, or strip the artifact to public-safe content.
2. Does this read on a claim we’d want to file? If yes, is there a provisional or non-provisional already on file with a priority date before this disclosure?
3. Do we care about foreign patent rights for this method? If yes, a filing has to be on file beforethe disclosure — there’s no grace period to recover into.
4. If this is going to a consumer-tier LLM, does it contain proprietary method detail? If yes, scrub or move to an enterprise-tier path. Otherwise, treat the prompt as published.
5. Has the named IP reviewer signed off? Not the team, not the founder remembering to think about it — the named gatekeeper, in the workflow, with a checkpoint that has to be cleared.

The decision rule that comes out of this: if any answer is “no” or “not sure,” the artifact doesn’t go out until it’s resolved.No exceptions for “it’s just a quick post” or “they’re trustworthy.” Trustworthy people aren’t the failure mode. Procedural gaps are.

Prompt kit

Three prompts for running the IP review gate. The first two run before specific actions; the third is an audit you run once on existing artifacts.

I'm about to <publish / post / pitch / demo / share> the following:

<paste the artifact — slide deck, blog post, README, repo, demo plan>

Walk through:
1. Does this artifact describe a method, system, or process that
   could be patentable? If yes, which parts read on what a claim
   would look like?
2. Has anything in this artifact already been disclosed publicly
   before? If yes, when and where? (US grace-period math.)
3. If this is the first public disclosure, what filings should be
   in place BEFORE it goes out to preserve patent rights:
     - US: provisional or non-provisional?
     - Foreign (EPO, China, Japan, Canada)?
4. Is there confidential information in here that doesn't need to
   be public for the artifact to do its job? Suggest scrubs.

Output: a go/no-go recommendation, the filings I should have on
file first, and a redline of anything to strip before publish.

I want to paste the following into <ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini /
other LLM> to help with <task>:

<paste the prompt or describe the contents>

Walk through:
1. Does this contain proprietary code, method detail, training
   data, customer data, or business strategy?
2. Is the destination tool consumer-tier (training allowed,
   standard ToS) or enterprise-tier (signed DPA, no-training,
   zero or scoped retention)?
3. If consumer-tier + proprietary content: what's the scrubbed
   version that gets the same answer? (Describe shape, not
   secret sauce.)
4. If proprietary content is unavoidable, name the enterprise
   path that's safe to use.

Output: safe / not safe, the scrubbed version if relevant, and
the right destination.

Read everything I've published in the last 18 months that's
publicly accessible (blog posts, READMEs, public repos, conference
talks, podcast transcripts, pitch decks shared without NDA).

For each artifact:
- What was disclosed about our methods, models, or systems?
- What's the publication date?
- Does any of it read on a claim we'd want to file?

Output a table:
| artifact | date | what was disclosed | grace period status |

Flag anything where the US one-year grace period has closed or is
within 60 days of closing — those are file-now-or-lose-rights items.

Apply this — stand up the IP review gate

One-sitting exercise.Name the reviewer. Wire them into the workflow. Run the pre-publish check on the next artifact. The whole thing takes about an hour and prevents the failure mode that’s unrecoverable.