The policy behind the criteria of novelty and nonobviousness is that a patent should not remove something from the public domain that either exists as the claimed invention or exists as an obvious variation of the claimed invention. U.S. courts have yet to decide whether an electronic publication can be considered as prior art. Over the years, courts have added a gloss to the printed publication language to encompass other forms of information as technology changed. Accordingly, the current test for determining whether a disclosure is a printed publication focuses on the accessibility of the information rather than on the form of the alleged prior art. Internet publications are particularly amenable to the current printed publication test.
Any information posted on Internet becomes accessible to interested parties throughout the world.
Moreover, servers that store the posted information also can provide the date that the information became accessible. Patent rights outside the U.S. may be destroyed at the time that an invention is disclosed in an electronic publication if a patent application has not been filed. Thus, the European Patent Office clearly focuses on the availability of a disclosure, regardless of form. Again, the issue is the availability of particular information and not the form of the information. A Hitchhiker's Guide to Internet Electronic Publication Electronic publications on Internet can be found at Gopher sites, file transfer protocol archives, World Wide Web sites, newsgroups and listserver archives.