Sufficiency Of Disclosure

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Most patent law systems require that a patent application disclose a claim (patent)ed invention in sufficient detail for the notional person skilled in the art to carry out that claimed invention. This requirement is often known as sufficiency of disclosure or enablement, depending on the jurisdiction.

Background The disclosure requirement lies at the heart and origin of patent law. A state or government grants an inventor, or the inventor's Assignment (law), a monopoly for a given period of time in exchange for the inventor disclosing to the public how to make or practice his or her invention. If a patent fails to contain such information, then the bargain is violated, and the patent is unenforceable.

European law Article 83 of the European Patent Convention states that an application must disclose the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete for it to be carried out by a person skilled in the art. Sufficiency is considered by the examiner during examination of a patent application and the requirement of Article 83 must be complied with in order for a patent to be granted. Insufficient disclosure is also a ground for opposition under Article 100(b).

Insufficiency is also a ground for revocation under Section 72 of the UK Patents Act.

United States law In United States patent law, the patent specification must be complete enough so that a person of "ordinary skill in the art" of the invention can make and use the invention without “undue experimentation". There is no precise definition of "undue experimentation" in U.S. patent law. The standard is determined based on the art of the invention.

In the "predictable arts", such as mechanics inventions and software inventions, very little description is required. A mere flow chart of a piece of software, for example, is adequate. Source code is not normally required. In the “unpredictable arts”, such as chemistry and pharmaceuticals, a very complete description is required.

In a recent U.S. court case, several of Jerome H. Lemelson patents covering bar code readers were held to be invalid because the specification was not complete enough for a person of ordinary skill in the art of electrical engineering to have made and used the claimed invention at the time the patent was filed (1954) without undue experimentation. In this case the court held that a person of ordinary skill in the art was a degreed electrical engineer with two years of experience as of the filing date of the original patent application, 1954. One of the challenges of this court case, which was decided in 2005, was to find experts on the state of the art who were alive in 1954.

Best mode requirement In the United States, the sufficiency of disclosure requirement is complemented by an additional requirement, generally not found in other national patent jurisdictions: the "best mode requirement". According to the requirement, the disclosure must also contain the inventor's "best mode" of making or practicing the invention. For example, if an inventor knows that a liquid should be heated to 250 degrees for optimal performance, but discloses in the patent that the liquid should be heated to "above 200 degrees", then the inventor has not disclosed his "best mode" for carrying out the invention.

The "best mode requirement" only applies to what the inventor knows at the time the application was filed, not as to what was subsequently discovered.

Enablement United States patent law further requires, among other things, that the patent specification "contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same." 35 U.S.C. 112(1). The requirement "to enable" a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention is colloquially referred to as the "enablement" requirement. A patent that does not meet the enablement requirement may be declared invalid by a court.

Further reading

Matthew J. Dowd, Nancy J. Leith and Jeffrey S. Weaver, Nanotechnology and the Best Mode, Nanotechnology Law & Business Journal, September 2005 (pdf file)
Matthew J. Dowd, Elimination of the Best Mode: Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater?, IPL Newsletter Fall 2005, http://www.skgf.com/media/news/news.231.pdf