Trademark

Terminal disclaimer

A document filed with the USPTO in which a patent applicant agrees that the term of a patent will end no later than the expiration of an earlier related patent. Terminal disclaimers are commonly required to overcome an "obviousness-type double patenting" rejection — which occurs when two related patents claim inventions that aren't patentably distinct from each other.

Trade secret

Confidential business information that provides a competitive advantage and is subject to reasonable efforts to keep it secret. Unlike patents, trade secrets have no registration requirement and can last indefinitely — but only as long as the secret is maintained. The formula for Coca-Cola and the Google search algorithm are famous examples. Trade secrets and patents are often compared: patents give stronger rights but require disclosure; trade secrets keep information hidden but can be lost if independently discovered.

Abstract

A brief summary (300 words or fewer) that appears at the top of every patent. The abstract describes what the invention does in general terms. Legally, it has almost no weight — courts use the claims to determine what a patent covers, not the abstract. The abstract is useful mainly for quickly scanning patents during a prior art search.

Anticipation

A legal standard for rejecting a patent claim. If every element of a claim was already disclosed in a single prior art reference — in a patent, article, or product — the claim is "anticipated" and cannot be patented. Anticipation requires a single source to contain every element; if you need two sources, it's an obviousness argument, not anticipation.

Appeal

A request to have a patent examiner's rejection reviewed by a higher authority. After receiving multiple rejections, an applicant can appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) within the USPTO, and from there to federal court. Appeals are expensive and slow, but sometimes necessary when an examiner applies the law incorrectly.

Art unit

A group of patent examiners at the USPTO who specialize in a particular technology area. Each application is assigned to the art unit whose examiners are trained in the relevant field. The art unit assignment matters because examiner expertise — and rejection rates — vary significantly across technology areas.