Terms of Publication

Version 0.9 (public beta), effective 22 October 2026. These terms will be finalised after legal review; we will email account holders before any change takes effect.

1. Who we are

Open Prior Art ("the registry", "we") is operated by Adria Intellectual Property, Croatia ("the operator"). Contact: [email protected].

2. What the registry is, and what it is not

The registry publishes technical disclosures written by their authors, with a date that can be independently checked. It is not a patent office, a patent attorney or a legal adviser. Publishing here does not give you a patent, a trademark, or any other right. It does not check whether your invention is new, works, or is safe.

3. Who may publish

To publish you need a verified account: one per person, confirmed by email. You must be at least 18 years old. You may submit up to 3 disclosures in 24 hours. We may suspend an account that is used to get around these limits, to publish on someone else's behalf without their permission, or to break these terms.

4. What you may publish

A disclosure must describe a technical idea: a product, process, apparatus, composition, method or use. It must be written by you, or by someone who has authorised you, in your own words. You may not publish:

• someone else's confidential information, trade secrets, or anything you are bound by contract or law to keep secret (for example, under an employment contract or a non-disclosure agreement);
• an invention that belongs to your employer or a client, unless you have their written permission;
• text, images or drawings copied from someone else's work without the right to do so;
• personal data about other people;
• anything unlawful, including information whose publication is restricted for safety or export-control reasons;
• advertising, spam, or content that is not a technical disclosure.

5. Your confirmations

By submitting, you confirm that:

• you are the author or have the right to publish the disclosure and to grant the licences below;
• publishing it does not break any obligation you have to anyone else;
• you understand that publication will most likely prevent anyone, including you, from patenting what you disclose;
• the information you gave us about yourself is true.

6. Licence

You keep the copyright in your text and drawings. By publishing, you:

• license the published disclosure to everyone under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Anyone may copy, share and adapt it, for any purpose, including commercially, as long as they credit it. The credit line is "[Anonymous, or the name you chose], Open Prior Art, [entry number]";
• grant the operator a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to store, reproduce, format, timestamp, archive and distribute the disclosure, and to deposit copies with independent archives (such as the Internet Archive and, in future, Zenodo), so that the publication and its date can be proven.

These licences cannot be withdrawn once the disclosure is published.

7. Permanence

Publication is permanent. You cannot delete a published entry, and closing your account does not remove it. Copies deposited with outside archives are beyond our control. (Corrected or extended versions, which will keep earlier versions visible with their own dates, are planned after the beta.)

8. Retraction by us

We may retract an entry only if it breaks the law or these terms (for example, it contains someone else's confidential information or personal data), or if a court or authority orders it. A retracted entry is hidden from public view and marked "Retracted" with its number, date and the reason in general terms. We keep a record of it, including its fingerprint, as evidence.

9. Review

Every submission is checked before publication. During the beta, every submission is reviewed by a person. Automated tools help by pointing out possible problems; they do not write or change your text. We may refuse a submission, or ask you to change it, without giving detailed reasons. Nothing is public until it is published, and the publication date is the date it goes online, not the date you submitted it.

10. Anonymity and names

Your entry is shown as "Anonymous" unless you choose to show your name or company name. We keep your account details privately to confirm a real person made the submission and to handle legal requests. We will disclose them only with your consent, or when we are legally required to (for example, by a court order). Our privacy notice explains how we handle your data.

11. Proof of date and certificate

We record a content fingerprint (SHA-256) of each published entry, obtain timestamps for it from independent timestamping services, and request a copy in the Internet Archive. We issue a Certificate of Publication that anyone can check on our verify page. We do our best to keep these records available, but we do not guarantee that any outside service will stay available.

12. No guarantees

We do not guarantee that:

• a patent office, examiner or court will find, read or rely on your entry;
• your entry will be treated as prior art, or will prevent, limit or invalidate any patent;
• the registry will always be available without interruption.

Whether a publication counts as prior art is decided by the patent office or court concerned, under its own law.

13. Liability

The registry is provided free of charge. We are not responsible for decisions of patent offices, courts or other third parties, including a patent granted to someone else. Otherwise, our liability is limited as far as the applicable law allows. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for intent or gross negligence, or for death or personal injury.

14. Reporting a problem

If you think an entry contains your confidential information, personal data or copyrighted material, or is otherwise unlawful, write to [email protected] with the entry number and the reason. We will look into it and reply within 14 days.

15. Changes

We may update these terms. The version that applied when an entry was published continues to govern that entry's licence (section 6). For other changes we will tell account holders by email at least 30 days before they take effect.

16. Law and courts

These terms are governed by Croatian law. Disputes go to the competent court in Croatia. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, or your right to bring proceedings there.