Anybody to whom you disclose your invention must agree
in advance that it is confidential and that the information will
not be used by them or passed on. Outside an immediate circle of
family and possibly friends, you should have a written
confidentiality agreement signed. The safest thing is to limit
disclosures strictly until a patent application has been
filed.
If there have already been disclosures of your invention, you
should give us details of those. In many cases they may be treated
as confidential in any event but we need to assess the situation.
Even if patent protection cannot be obtained in the UK or elsewhere
in Europe, there will be other countries where it may be possible.
One of those is the United States, where a patent application can
be filed up to a year after your own disclosures.
