Intellectual Frontiers

Publish-or-Protect

Use this skill when the user is about to make an invention, method, or technical result public and needs the choice laid out first: file a patent application, publish defensively, or keep it a trade secret.

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This skill is Labor as Code™ for the Publish-or-Protect decision in Discoverability Engineering. The know-how is an operator's habit of asking, before anything goes public, what publishing would give away and what it would protect, and of putting the answer in front of the people who decide.

The method comes from "Patents and Prior Art Are Public Evidence That Needs a Date Anyone Can Prove." Read it for the three outcomes, the foreign-rights risk, and Merriden's September 24 decisions. This skill runs the comparison on the user's own inventions. It does not retell those decisions.

This skill does not decide and is not legal advice. It drafts the comparison. A person who owns the business and a patent attorney decide each outcome, because a public disclosure cannot be undone and the rules differ by country. That restraint is the book's own subject matter: the AI Workforce drafts and never decides what to file, publish, or keep secret. Where the book presents three defensible paths, the skill lays them out side by side with reasons instead of picking one.

Before running

  1. Which invention, in the operator's words. Get the notes. Ask what it is, who built it, when, and whether any customer, partner, or funding agency was involved. Do not assume company money.
  2. Whether anything about it is already public. Ask about talks, pages, posted notes, trade-show demonstrations, sales decks, and shipped products. Search the public web and the archive for the invention's key terms and record what turns up with its date.
  3. Who decides. Name the person for the business and the patent attorney. If the company has no attorney, the comparison says the decision waits for one.

Step 1: Say what the invention teaches and what is public

  1. Write what the invention teaches in a claim's words.
  2. List every item already public, with its first public date and the source of that date. If none, write "nothing found," and list what was searched.
  3. Write the earliest public date. It starts every clock below.

Step 2: Compare the three outcomes

Write one column per outcome, each with reasons:

  1. File a patent application. What a filing could protect, what it discloses when the application publishes about 18 months after the earliest filing date, whether a provisional application would hold the date, and what any earlier public date has already cost. Note that a license is required before filing abroad within six months of filing in the United States, and that an application under a secrecy order is never published.
  2. Publish defensively. What a dated, enabling, findable disclosure would stop others from patenting, and what it gives up: the company's own patent rights, at once in most countries and after a year in the United States.
  3. Keep it a trade secret. What must stay secret for the value to last, whether the company takes reasonable measures to keep it secret, and what a public mention of the values would end. Say what the public may be told: that a practice exists, without its values.

Step 3: Mark the holds

  1. Mark HOLD on any technical data that may be export controlled. Such data is not a candidate for defensive publication. The attorney or the company's export control contact clears it.
  2. Mark HOLD on anything a customer, a prime, or a funding agency has rights in. List the clause or agreement name if the user gives it.
  3. Mark HOLD on any date the skill could not establish.

Step 4: Record and conclude

Write the entry in specs/disclosure/publish-or-protect.yaml with the decision field left blank until it is made. Then conclude:

  1. The trade-off in two sentences, naming the outcome the facts favor and the reason, or naming two outcomes when the facts do not separate them.
  2. What would change the answer: a filing already made, an earlier public date, a customer's rights, or an attorney's view of the foreign-rights cost.
  3. Who decides and by when, including any deadline the earliest public date sets.

Never write a recommendation as a decision. Never draft public text for an invention whose outcome is not decided.

What this skill does not do

  • It does not publish, file, or send anything.
  • It does not state that a disclosure is or is not prior art.
  • It does not clear export-controlled data.