Every inventor reaches a moment when they need to talk to someone about their idea. Maybe it’s a potential co-founder, a manufacturer who can tell them if it’s buildable, an investor who might fund it, or a friend with relevant expertise. The question is always some version of the same thing: can I tell this person without putting my patent rights at risk?
The answer depends on who you’re talking to, what you tell them, and whether they’re under any obligation to keep it confidential. Getting this wrong isn’t just inconvenient, some disclosure mistakes permanently eliminate patent rights in major markets, and there’s no way to undo them after the fact. This guide explains the rules clearly, names the scenarios where inventors most commonly get into trouble, and gives you a framework for protecting yourself while still being able to build your business.
Gallium Law works with inventors navigating exactly these conversations. If you’re approaching a fundraising pitch, a manufacturer meeting, or a trade show and want to understand where you stand, we’re happy to walk through the specifics with you.
What Legally Counts as a Public Disclosure
A public disclosure is any communication that makes your invention available to the public without restriction. The key phrase is “without restriction”: if the person you’re telling has a legal obligation to keep it confidential, the conversation generally doesn’t count as a public disclosure for patent purposes.
Public disclosures include things that are obviously public: selling a product that embodies your invention, publishing an article about it, presenting at a conference, posting on social media, or launching a crowdfunding campaign. They also include things that feel more private: sending an email to someone who isn’t bound by confidentiality, describing your invention in a pitch meeting without an NDA in place, or showing a prototype to someone under a handshake agreement.
The test isn’t whether you intended for the information to spread. It’s whether the person you told was legally obligated to keep it confidential.
The US Grace Period: And Why It’s Not the Safety Net It Sounds Like
The United States gives inventors a one-year grace period after their own public disclosure to file a patent application. This means that if you disclose your invention publicly on a specific date, you have until that same date one year later to file in the US and still potentially get a patent.
Many inventors hear about this grace period and treat it as a buffer, a year of runway to test the market, talk to investors, and figure out whether the patent is worth pursuing. This is a significant misunderstanding of what the grace period actually does.
The grace period protects only your US rights. It does nothing for your international patent rights. Most countries, including all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, Canada, and Australia, operate under what’s called an absolute novelty requirement. That means any public disclosure before your patent filing date destroys your ability to get a patent in those countries, regardless of when you file, regardless of whether you filed in the US within the grace period.
If you disclose on Monday and file a US patent application the following Monday, your US rights may be fine. Your European rights may already be lost, and your Chinese rights as well. In most cases, these are not recoverable losses.
For inventors who plan to sell internationally, manufacture overseas, or license to companies that operate globally, the one-year grace period is not a safety net. It’s a trap that sounds like one.
NDAs: When They Work and When They Don’t
A properly executed non-disclosure agreement with the person you’re talking to generally converts a potentially public disclosure into a confidential one. If the NDA is in place before you share anything, covers the right subject matter, and is signed by someone with authority to bind the other party, it provides real protection.
The complications are practical rather than theoretical. NDAs with individuals are difficult to enforce if something goes wrong. NDAs with large companies often get delayed, watered down in negotiation, or never signed at all. In the meantime, the conversation you were waiting to have either happens without one or doesn’t happen. Some parties, particularly large corporations and some venture capital firms, have policies against signing NDAs at early stages.
A good NDA covers: what information is confidential, what the recipient can and can’t do with it, how long the obligation lasts, and what happens if there’s a breach. An NDA that’s too narrow in its definition of confidential information, or that has broad carve-outs for information “independently developed,” may provide less protection than it appears to.
Even with a solid NDA, consulting a patent attorney before having significant disclosure conversations is a reasonable precaution, particularly if you’re talking to parties in multiple countries.
The One Person You Can Always Tell: Your Patent Attorney
Communications with your patent attorney are protected by attorney-client privilege. You can describe your invention in complete detail, share prototypes, explain your concerns, and ask every question you have, none of that creates a public disclosure or affects your patent rights in any way.
This is worth stating explicitly because some inventors hesitate to share full details with their attorney until an application is filed, worrying that even that conversation is somehow a risk. It isn’t. Your attorney’s job is to understand your invention completely in order to protect it.
The Kickstarter Problem
This deserves its own section because it’s one of the most common and most damaging mistakes inventors make, and it’s almost never discussed in inventor guidance.
Launching a crowdfunding campaign, on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or any similar platform, is a public disclosure. The moment your campaign goes live, you have disclosed your invention to the world without restriction. In the United States, your one-year grace period clock starts ticking. In most of the rest of the world, your international patent rights are gone immediately.
Inventors launch crowdfunding campaigns before filing patents constantly. The logic makes emotional sense: they want to validate market demand before spending money on a patent application. But the legal consequence is that a successful Kickstarter campaign, the very outcome they’re hoping for, eliminates their ability to protect the product that created the demand.
If you’re considering a crowdfunding campaign, file at least a provisional patent application before your campaign launches. The provisional establishes your filing date, costs considerably less than a full application, and lets you describe your product as “patent pending” in your campaign materials. This preserves your US rights for twelve months and, critically, preserves your international rights entirely.
Trade Shows and Conferences
Presenting at a trade show or industry conference is generally a public disclosure. Showing a product, distributing brochures, or demonstrating how your invention works to attendees who are not under confidentiality obligations would typically qualify.
Some inventors try to work around this by presenting only high-level concepts and keeping key technical details confidential. Whether this strategy actually avoids a disclosure depends heavily on what specifically is novel about the invention and what gets revealed in the presentation. This is a question worth discussing with a patent attorney before the event, not after.
Filing before a significant trade show appearance is the cleanest approach. It’s also common practice, “patent pending” displayed at a trade show booth signals that protection is in progress and can deter competitors from copying what they see.
Co-Founders and Employees
Telling a co-founder or employee about your invention without a written confidentiality and assignment agreement in place creates several problems simultaneously. The disclosure may or may not be protected depending on the circumstances, and the ownership of any IP they contribute to may be unclear.
Co-founders who contribute to the development of an invention may become co-inventors, which affects patent ownership. Employees who develop inventions in the course of their employment may or may not own those inventions depending on the jurisdiction, their employment agreement, and what the invention relates to. These are situations where the assignment of IP rights needs to be addressed in writing before significant collaboration begins.
A patent attorney can help you think through both the disclosure protection and the IP ownership questions before they become complicated.
Overseas Manufacturers
Sharing your invention with a manufacturer, particularly one in China or other countries with manufacturing ecosystems, is a high-risk disclosure scenario. Confidentiality agreements with overseas manufacturers exist and provide some protection, but enforcement is difficult and the manufacturing supply chain in some regions is interconnected in ways that make true confidentiality hard to achieve.
More fundamentally, China operates on an absolute novelty standard, and patent rights there can be important even for companies that don’t primarily target Chinese consumers. Manufacturing partners, component suppliers, and distribution networks in China may develop competing products if your invention isn’t protected there.
Filing before sharing your invention with any overseas manufacturer is strongly advisable if Chinese or broader international patent protection is part of your strategy.
A Practical Framework
Before you share your invention with anyone, ask two questions: Is this person under a written, signed confidentiality obligation that covers what I’m about to share? And have I filed at least a provisional patent application?
If the answer to both questions is yes, the conversation is generally safe. If the answer to either is no, think carefully about whether this is the right moment for the conversation, or whether a quick filing would change the calculus significantly.
This isn’t about being secretive or distrustful. It’s about making the decisions that preserve your options. The conversations you want to have can almost always happen; it’s just a matter of sequencing them correctly.
Gallium Law helps inventors work through exactly these questions before they become problems. If you’re approaching a disclosure and want to understand where you stand, we invite you to reach out.
