Will the full disclosure of patents lead to the misappropriation of patents?

How to deal with the relationship between full disclosure and keeping technical secrets

When writing patent application documents with technical secrets, three aspects should usually be considered:

1. First of all, we should consider which technical features are necessary to solve its technical problems and which are additional technical features to better solve technical problems. The necessary technical features for solving technical problems must be fully disclosed in the manual and shall not be kept as technical secrets.

2. Fully search, find the closest comparison documents and related documents, and preliminarily judge whether the invention or utility model that keeps some technical points as technical secrets is still novel and creative, that is, consider whether the invention can not obtain a patent right after keeping technical secrets. If this is possible, it is best not to keep it in the specification. Otherwise, when the examiner puts forward that the application does not have novelty and creativity, it cannot be added to the specification because the original specification does not disclose this technical point, thus losing the possibility of obtaining a patent right.

3. It is necessary to consider whether these technical points are of practical significance as technical secrets. Generally speaking, it is better to keep the technical features of method inventions as technical secrets than to keep the structural features of products that have not been circulated in the market. For the latter, it is difficult to keep its structural features as a technical secret, because ordinary technicians can know its specific structure after buying this product from the market, so it is of no practical significance to regard this technical feature as a technical secret without writing it into the specification.