World 4 · Innovation Scout · Lesson 14

Prior art and novelty

Prior art is everything made public before your filing date — including your own posts. A search can find a reason against novelty, but it can never prove novelty.

5 min
Jurisdictions: International / treaty, Australia, Vietnam
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026

Draft — awaiting editorial review

Educational content, not legal advice. Lessons are drafts awaiting editorial review.

You will learn to

Explain what counts as prior art.
Tell novelty apart from inventive step.
Know the official databases and the limits of a search.

What prior art is

Prior art is what was made public before your filing (or priority) date: patents, published applications, journal articles, theses, products on sale, videos, conference talks — and your own posts or demos. In many countries, including Australia and Vietnam, prior art is not limited to that country: a disclosure anywhere in the world can count. A document does not stop being prior art because it is in another language.

Novelty and inventive step

These two criteria are often confused. Broadly, an invention lacks novelty when a single earlier disclosure already shows all of its features. But an invention that is new can still be refused for lacking an inventive step — when a person with ordinary skill in the field, looking at the prior art, would find the solution obvious. How each test is applied differs between countries. Examiners and courts, not the applicant, decide both questions.

Where to search, and what a search cannot show

Free official sources include PATENTSCOPE (WIPO), Espacenet (EPO), Australian Patent Search (IP Australia) and IP Vietnam's WIPO Publish. Use synonyms in several languages and patent classification codes, and record the date, the source and the terms you used. But searching has limits: patent applications are usually unpublished for a period after filing (in many systems about 18 months), and many articles, products and videos are not in patent databases at all. Finding nothing does not mean the invention is new.

Try a scenario

Minh, an engineer in Ho Chi Minh City, has built an IoT soil-moisture sensor. He searched Australian Patent Search in English for an afternoon and found nothing similar. He meets investors next week.

What should he tell the investors?

"Our invention is new — we checked."Say nothing about the search."We found no close match in the databases and terms we searched, on this date. We will widen the search and ask a professional."

Check your understanding

PracticePractice testSee the explanation after each question.

Pass mark: 80% — for this lesson that means every question.

Question 1 of 4Thao posted a video showing her new device in detail on social media three months before filing a patent application.Is that video relevant to prior art?

No — your own disclosure never counts.No — social media is not a publication.Yes — it can be prior art; whether a grace period saves it depends on each country's law.

Take away

Record a search as "nothing found, within the scope searched" — never as "proven new".

Apply it to your IP

Nothing runs or is saved on its own. Each option only opens a tool when you choose it.

What this lesson cannot tell you

This lesson cannot tell you whether your invention is new or inventive. Only an examiner or a court decides that, and your search cannot see applications that are not yet published.