What is a priority date for a patent application?
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What is a priority date for a patent application? Video Transcript
In this section, we are going to identify some related and miscellaneous issues. A lot of these issues center around whether you filed other patent applications that this invention is claiming the priority to. Were there any other patent applications that you filed that you want to use as a basis for the priority of this invention? Were there any provisional applications that you filed last year? Is this a continuation application of another patent you filed before? You have to make sure that you protect your earliest priority date because potential infringers, or people that might do what you are doing, have that earliest priority date as the date of your conception, as the constructive date of your conception because that earliest date, by indicating it here, allows you to get priority to that other application. There are certain requirements for that to occur. You have to have copendency which means both patent applications have to be alive and not yet issued. So the one in the past that you are claiming priority should not be issued patents, but pending applications. You also need to make sure there is at least one inventor that is common to both applications. You need to make sure that they are both owned by the same parties. You need to make sure that the applications are related. So in the applications that we are writing now, we specifically claim priority to the other one and there is a subject matter which actually overlaps between the two. So this is the primary goal of this section, is to identified what other patent applications might be out there that you can claim support to.