Steve Taylor wrote:
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You can be granted a patent in US law up to twelve months after prior disclosure ! In European patent law, any publication before filing invalidates the patent.

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True, and you must file within 12 months of the breakthrough in the US.

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I got burned there once on a encoding scheme I did for the US Navy. We were doing a small contract involving me (electronics and software) and a mechanical engineer (machine design and construction). I created a bit of mathematical magic that could have been used in our US Postal contracts but the company wasn't listening because it was only a small 3 million dollar contract.

As we were testing the two units we built inhouse prior to shipping, the company sent some photographers down to get pictures the annual report to stockholders. The company president came down to pose and between setups chatted about the project. He liked the Postal contract angle and said he'd pursue it. A few weeks later he told me we just missed the 12 month window. BUMMER!

It was the perfect situation for me... I had no paperwork to fill out and I got the company president involved in a breakthrough I created. :)
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But the point of my original message on protection from others' patent claims is the creation of proper undisclosed documentation. This way, you can keep your secrets and if someone claims a patent on the process later on, you can then disclose that you've documented prior use pre-dating their innovation. Production line use is a great form of documentation. That can be used to invalidate the granted patent, but usually the patent holder agrees not annoy the pre-dating company so he can ward off all others with his patent. If the patent claim holder annoys the that company sufficiently, they can file to invalidate the patent.

US Patent law sucked after the the changes made during Reagan's administration. My law classes predate those changes, but in effect Reagan's changes said the US Patent office only grants patents on the best of their knowledge and its up to the grantees to legal fight to protect them. This helps wealthy companies play the patent games and weakens the little inventors to near annihilation.

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I personally avoided patents as best as I could after Reagan. That telecom patent only came about because my boss asked to be included on my patent since he had no patents himself. I told him I didn't want to do the paperwork but if he wrote all the paperwork I didn't care. He wrote one page worth which was unacceptable and so I had to spend 6 weeks with a patent attorney explaining the complex algorithm process.

To make matters worse, my boss was truthful that he had no patent yet but didn't tell me he attached his name on about 5 other patents at that time and thus was able to claim half the company award bonus. He soon left the company with the listings and uses my code and old company's patent in his software company serving the telecom industry. This is illegal but fuzzy enough he gets away with it. I just got disgusted with the telecom industry and returned to circuit and product design.
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aka j