U.S. legal shorthand that refers to §102 of the U.S. Patent Act, 35 U.S.C. §102 which sets forth the novelty requirement for the grant of a U.S. Patent. The various non-novelty grounds are set forth in subsections of §102 which will often also be identified. These are
- 102(a) non-novelty because of prior public knowledge or use or described in a printed publication before the priority date of the patent or patent application;
- 102(b) “time barred” because use or description of the invention in a publication or because it had been placed “on sale” by the inventor, more than one year before the filing date of the patent application (or the date it benefits from under the Patent Cooperation Treaty or Paris Convention);
- 102(c) abandonment of the invention by the inventor;
- 102(d) time barred because of the filing of a foreign patent application (i.e., outside the US) more than one year prior to the filing of the U.S. application;
- 102(e) a prior patent application upon the same invention filed by another before the date of invention of the instant patent;
- 102(f) derived subject matter, i.e., the wrong inventor has been disclosed “he did not himself invent the subject matter sought to be patented”;
- 102(g) prior invention by another inventor (even where the inventor in the instant patent claim independently created the same invention).