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There are two different international treaties that are most important here. There is the Paris Convention, which was signed many, many years ago, over a hundred years ago. And what it says is that if you file a patent application in one member country and you file in the second member country within one year, then your effective filing date in that second country is the same as the first.

And therefore, any intervener that came in between will be cut off by your earlier filing date. What happened was, though As things became more expensive, you would file an application, let’s say, in the United States, and by the time that one year came up where you had to file abroad, you didn’t even know if you were getting a patent in the United States, because perhaps you hadn’t even heard back from the patent office with regard to an examiner’s search.

So they came up with the Patent Cooperation Treaty, which does many things, the most important of which is that it extends that one-year period to two and a half years.