Staking Your Claim: Defining And Enabling Your Invention To Get A Priority Date

You understand how your invention works. Now you want to stake your claim to the invention as broadly and inexpensively as possible. By filing a patent application that establishes your possession of the invention you can obtain a priority date for your invention. And you want to do so soon since, to obtain a valid patent, you must be the first to establish possession of the claimed invention (your application must have priority in time). Whether you have first possession of a claimed invention is judged as of the priority date, typically the filing date of your first patent application (to be patentable, your claimed invention must be new and unobvious as of the priority date). Delaying the priority date may make it impossible to establish first possession.