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This is an online form for disclosing an invention to Red Hat's legal department so that it can consider whether
to pursue patent protection for that invention. Each time you advance to the next screen of the form, your work
is automatically saved. If some of the requested information is not available at this time, please include as much
information as possible. If the legal department decides to pursue patent protection for an invention, the attorney
drafting the patent application will likely request additional information.

Generally, patent protection is available for inventions that are new and nonobvious. The legal analysis of
whether an invention is obvious, however, has little relationship to your intuitive understanding of that term.
For this reason, please submit your inventions liberally and refrain from discarding them too hastily.

You do not need to have reduced your invention to actual practice (i.e., created a working prototype or written
code) to pursue patent protection for your invention. Rather, you only need to have the ability to describe the
operation of your invention at a level of detail that would enable one “skilled in the art” (e.g., a software engineer
or computer scientist) to make and use the invention.

While some foreign-filing rights may have been lost if the invention has already been publicly disclosed (e.g.,
if code incorporating the invention has been publicly used or distributed), a U.S. patent application can be filed
up to a year after such a disclosure, although filing earlier rather than later is preferable. So even if the invention
has already been publicly disclosed, please submit your invention anyway.

Click here to begin filling out the online disclosure form for your invention.

Click here to see the status of your past disclosures and to modify any past disclosures.