(85c) Remarks on Ethics in Patenting

A patent applicant has a duty of candor in filing papers with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This duty can implicate, for example, the need to be honest when presenting data, and particularly not falling into the trap of excluding less-favorable data when trying to demonstrate unexpectedly good results to the USPTO. There are some notable cases in which failure to be honest with the USPTO, such as by failing to present all the data, led to a patent being entirely invalidated as unenforceable.