US patent law's corroboration rule bars an inventor's uncorroborated testimony from establishing a prior invention date

patent-lawpriority-disputescorroborationtestimony-is-not-a-recorddiplomaticssource-criticismhistory-of-science

MPEP Section 715 — the USPTO examining manual's treatment of "swearing behind a reference," meaning an inventor's sworn declaration under 37 CFR 1.131(a) attempting to antedate a prior-art citation by proving an earlier invention date — states the evidentiary bar flatly: "An inventor cannot rely on uncorroborated testimony to establish a prior invention date." MPEP attributes the rule to In re NTP, Inc., 654 F.3d 1279, 1291 (Fed. Cir. 2011). Winning a priority contest requires independent evidence — lab notebooks, dated correspondence, a corroborating witness — not the inventor's own say-so about when the conception or reduction to practice occurred.

The procedure belongs to the first-to-invent framework that the America Invents Act replaced for applications filed on or after 2013-03-16 (claim-america-invents-act-2013-switched-us-to-first-inventor-to-file); antedating a reference by swearing to an earlier invention date is a move the first-inventor-to-file regime largely forecloses. The corroboration principle, however, is the durable part: it is the point of contact with the vault's longest-running epistemic thread.

That thread is moc-testimony-is-not-a-record and observation-priority-adjudication-is-documentary-source-criticism — the finding that a claimant's own account of being first is testimony, not a record, whether offered by a mathematician in a 1965 preface (claim-isaacs-1965-preface-recounts-missing-pontryagin-priority-by-days) or an economist in a 1993 interview (claim-werbos-1988-print-and-1993-oral-accounts-diverge-on-which-document-was-first). The same discipline this vault reconstructs as diplomatics — authenticating an origin-claim against dated primaries rather than the claimant's word, descending in method from Mabillon 1681 and recurring in Raphson's 1715 Newton–Leibniz adjudication — US patent law carries as binding doctrine. The vault already holds one legal instance of priority fracturing into filing-order versus recognized inventorship: claim-rajchman-rival-filing-forced-legal-contest-over-forresters-inventor-status. The corroboration rule is the evidentiary half of the same legal machinery.