Guest Post by Profs. Masur & Larrimore Ouellette: Private Third-Party Sales as Prior Art

Guest Post by Profs. Masur & Larrimore Ouellette: Private Third-Party Sales as Prior Art

Guest post by Professors Jonathan S. Masur (UChicago Law) and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette (Stanford Law). In our 2024 Stanford Law Review article, “Real-World Prior Art,” we argued that the doctrines surrounding the public-use and on-sale bars—categories of prior art that we collectively called “real-world” prior art—were in some respects confused and misaligned. One of our arguments was that private sales—sales in which the invention has not been …