The ways engineering teams disclose inventions by accident

The common leaks

Public repositories. Code, commit messages and issue threads are public, dated and archived.

Talks and papers. Including internal-sounding meetups and industry webinars, which are recorded.

Supplier drawings. Sending full CAD to four contract manufacturers for quotes, with no NDA.

Customer demos and pilots without written confidentiality.

Support and installation documentation published on a website.

Job adverts. A detailed description of the system you are hiring someone to build is a disclosure with a date on it.

India has no general grace period, so any of these before your priority date can be prior art against your own application.

The cheap prevention

One rule, agreed once: nothing technical goes outside the company before someone has checked whether a filing is needed. That check takes fifteen minutes and prevents nearly all of it.

And keep a record of what was released and when. If a question arises later, the extent of the disclosure is the whole argument.

What to actually do

• Treat repositories, talks, adverts and supplier drawings as publications.
• Agree one internal rule: technical detail out only after an IP check.
• Use NDAs with suppliers, and send staged information until they are signed.
• Keep dated records of what was released.