Mar
28
What is a Provisional Patent Application?
Submitted by Warren Pate under Patents | Leave a Comment
In short, a provisional patent application is a placeholder. Provisional patent applications are never examined. They never issue as enforceable documents. Instead, they preserve for one (1) year your rights in whatever they disclose. With the filing of a provisional application, you are legally entitled to designate the corresponding invention as “Patent Pending.”
To preserve patent-pending status and pursue patent protection claiming priority (i.e., back in time) to a provisional patent application, the provisional patent application must be converted to a “non-provisional” patent application before the one year anniversary. If a provisional patent application expires without being converted, the rights it preserved cannot be extended. Depending on the facts of your situation, this may forfeit certain patent rights.