The crowdfunding campaign

How much did the campaign cost them?

A campaign page is a publication

It is public, dated, archived and enabling. The cutaway rendering and the staged description together may disclose the invention completely. There is no obligation of confidence on anyone who read it.

So the campaign is prior art against their own application - and, unusually, it is prior art that is trivially easy for an examiner or opponent to find, because it is indexed and permanently archived.

The commercial irony

The campaign proved demand, which is exactly the evidence that would have justified spending on a filing beforehand. Reversing those two steps costs almost nothing: a provisional filed the week before launch would have preserved the position entirely.

What may remain is whatever the campaign did not disclose - membrane chemistry, manufacturing tolerances, the assembly method. Those can be real and are worth assessing rather than assuming everything is lost.

What should have happened

• Filed a provisional before the campaign page went live.
• Decided which technical detail the page needed and which it did not - a campaign sells a benefit, not a cutaway.
• Kept an archived copy of the page as launched, so the extent of disclosure is provable.
• Checked whether markets with grace periods were worth pursuing if India was lost.

This scenario is a composite teaching example written by Ragulika IP. It does not describe any real client, application or matter, and any resemblance to a specific case is coincidental.