Background :

The use of background sections varies among the world’s patent regimes. In some patent systems the background section serves to disclose to the public the closest prior art applied against the patent application during examination. This is the situation in most European systems. In some countries such as the US, the prior art submitted by the patent applicant, as well as the prior art found by the examiner, is printed on the cover of the patent itself.

The background section is typically considered prior art disclosed by the inventor. Consequently, if the applicant’s own inventive disclosure ends up in the background section, the patent examiner may cite this section in the rejection of the applicant’s claims. Some patent offices take a fairly hard line about inventive disclosures in background sections, which is one of the reasons why patent agents should draft them carefully.

A good background section should be fairly short and merely set the stage for the technical disclosure to be provided in the detailed description section. The background section could describe the prior art at a very high level. The background section may conclude with a short, crisp statement about the shortcomings of the prior art but this must be written in a manner that does not disclose the solution to be described later in the application.