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Patentability
Within the context of a national or multilateral body of law, an invention is patentable if it meets the relevant legal conditions to be granted a patent. By extension, patentability also refers to the substantive conditions that must be met for a patent to be held valid. Requirements The patent laws usually require that, for an invention to be patentable, it must be: * Patentable subject matter, i.e., a kind of subject-matter eligible for patent protection (also called "statutory patentable subject-matter") * Novel (i.e. at least some aspect of it must be new) * Non-obvious (in United States patent law) or involve an inventive step (in European patent law and under the Patent Cooperation Treaty) * Useful (in U.S. patent law) or be susceptible of industrial application (in European patent law) Usually the term "''patentability''" only refers to the four aforementioned "substantive" conditions, and does not refer to formal conditions such as the " sufficiency of disclo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Filing Date
This is a list of legal terms relating to patents and patent law. A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention claimed therein, but a territorial right to exclude others from commercially exploiting the invention, granted to an inventor or their successor in rights in exchange to a public disclosure of the invention. A Abandonment Abandonment refers to the cessation of a patent application’s progress due to the applicant’s failure to make a bona fide attempt to advance the patent application to a final conclusion. Abandonment in patent prosecution can occur either voluntarily or involuntarily: * Voluntary abandonment (also called “express abandonment” or “formal abandonment”) occurs when the applicant explicitly communicates their intent to withdraw the application from consideration. * Involuntary abandonment happens when the applicant fails to meet specific requirements, such as failing to respond to an office action or failing to paying required fe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patentable Subject Matter
Patentable, statutory or patent-eligible subject matter is subject matter of an invention that is considered appropriate for patent protection in a given jurisdiction. The laws and practices of many countries stipulate that certain types of inventions should be denied patent protection. Together with criteria such as novelty, inventive step or nonobviousness, utility (or industrial applicability), which differ from country to country, the question of whether a particular subject matter is patentable is one of the substantive requirements for patentability. The problem of patentable subject matter arises usually in cases of biological and software inventions, and much less frequently in other areas of technology. Legislation The subject-matter which is regarded as patentable as a matter of policy, and correspondingly the subject-matter which is excluded from patentability as a matter of policy, depends on the national legislation or international treaty. Canada According ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novelty (patent)
Novelty is one of the patentability requirements for a patent claim, whose purpose is to prevent issuing patents on known things, i.e. to prevent public knowledge from being taken away from the public domain.: "I. Patentability; C. Novelty; 1. General" ("An invention can be patented only if it is new. An invention is considered to be new if it does not form part of the state of the art. The purpose of Art. 54(1) EPC is to prevent the state of the art being patented again (T 12/81, OJ 1982, 296; T 198/84, OJ 1985, 209).") An invention is anticipated (i.e. not new) and therefore not patentable if it was known to the public before the priority date of the patent application. Although the concept of "novelty" in patent law appears simple and self-explanatory, this view is very far from reality. Some of the most contentious questions of novelty comprise: # inventor's own prior disclosures (only a few countries provide a grace period, most notably, 1 year in the US); # new uses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Patent Law
Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited time (usually, 20 years) from profiting from a patented technology without the consent of the patent holder. Specifically, it is the right to exclude others from: making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, inducing others to infringe, applying for an FDA approval, and/or offering a product specially adapted for practice of the patent. History 1623. England adopts Statute of Monopolies, which has been acknowledged as a legal predecessor of the US patent law. 1789. U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 authorizes Congress "to promote the Progress of . . . useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to . . . Inventors the exclusive Right to their . . . Discoveries." It is believed that, unlike most parts of the U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utility (patent)
In United States patent law, utility is a patentability requirement. As provided by , an invention is "useful" if it provides some identifiable benefit and is capable of use and "useless" otherwise. The majority of inventions are usually not challenged as lacking utility, but the doctrine prevents the patenting of fantastic or hypothetical devices such as perpetual motion machines. The patent examiners guidelines require that a patent application expresses a specific, credible, and substantial utility. Rejection by an examiner usually requires documentary evidence establishing a '' prima facie'' showing that there is no specific, substantial, and credible utility. The main reason for having the utility requirement is to prevent issuing patents on things which are speculative and may block useful inventions in the future. In a pharmaceutical context, the utility problem usually arises when there is a patent claim on a new drug, but the patent disclosure does not specify (or d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patent Cooperation Treaty
The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international patent law treaty, concluded in 1970. It provides a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions in each of its contracting states. A patent application filed under the PCT is called an international application, or PCT application. A single filing of a PCT application is made with a Receiving Office (RO) in one language. It then results in a search performed by an International Searching Authority (ISA), accompanied by a written opinion regarding the patentability of the invention, which is the subject of the application. It is optionally followed by a preliminary examination, performed by an International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA). Finally, the relevant national or regional authorities administer matters related to the examination of application (if provided by national law) and issuance of patent. A PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prior Art
Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria for patentability. In most systems of patent law, prior art is generally defined as anything that is made available, or disclosed, to the public that might be relevant to a patent's claim before the effective filing date of a patent application for an invention. However, notable differences exist in how prior art is specifically defined under different national, regional, and international patent systems. The prior art is evaluated by patent offices as part of the patent granting process in what is called "substantive examination" of a patent application in order to determine whether an invention claimed in the patent application meets the novelty and inventive step or non-obviousness criteria for patentability. It may also be considered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reexamination
In United States patent law, a reexamination is a process whereby anyone—third party or inventor—can have a U.S. patent reexamined by a patent examiner to verify that the subject matter it claims is patentable. To have a patent reexamined, an interested party must submit prior art, in the form of patents or printed publications, that raises a "substantial new question of patentability". The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act makes substantial changes to the U.S. patent system, including new mechanisms for challenging patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. One of the new mechanisms is a post-grant review proceeding, which will provide patent challengers expanded bases on which to attack patents. Process A request for a reexamination can be filed by anyone at any time during the period of enforceability of a patent. To request a reexamination, one must submit a "request for reexamination" which includes (1) a statement pointing out each "substantial new question of pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opposition Procedure Before The European Patent Office
The opposition procedure before the European Patent Office (EPO) is a post-grant, contentious, '' inter partes'', administrative procedure intended to allow any European patent to be centrally opposed. European patents granted by the EPO under the European Patent Convention (EPC) may be opposed by any person from the public (no commercial or other interest whatsoever need be shown). This happens often when some prior art was not found during the grant procedure, but was only known by third parties. An opposition can only be based on a limited number of grounds,"The function of Article 100 EPC is to provide, within the framework of the EPC, a limited number of legal bases, ie a limited number of objections on which an opposition can be based." iDecision G 1/95 (19 July 1996) reasons 4.1. i.e. on the grounds that the subject-matter of the patent is not patentable, that the invention is insufficiently disclosed, or that the content of the patent extends beyond the content of the ap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
European Patent Convention
The European Patent Convention (EPC), also known as the Convention on the Grant of European Patents of 5 October 1973, is a multilateral treaty instituting the European Patent Organisation and providing an autonomous legal system according to which European patents are granted. The term ''European patent'' is used to refer to patents granted under the European Patent Convention. However, a European patent is not a unitary right, but a group of essentially independent nationally enforceable, nationally revocable patents, subject to central revocation or narrowing as a group pursuant to two types of unified, post-grant procedures: a time-limited opposition procedure before the European Patent Office, opposition procedure, which can be initiated by any person except the patent proprietor, and limitation and revocation procedures, which can be initiated by the patent proprietor only. The EPC provides a legal framework for the granting of European patents, via a single, harmonised p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inventor (patent)
In patent law, an inventor is the person, or persons in United States patent law, who contribute to the claims of a patentable invention. In some patent law frameworks, however, such as in the European Patent Convention (EPC) and its case law, no explicit, accurate definition of who exactly is an inventor is provided. The definition may slightly vary from one European country to another. Inventorship is generally not considered to be a patentability criterion under European patent law. Under older U.S. case law, an inventor is the one with "intellectual domination" over the inventive process and not merely one who assists in its reduction to practice. In the contemporary U.S. patent law inventor is defined as the person, who "conceived a claim". The persons who only made prototypes or suggested improvements not claimed in a patent are not inventors. As the patent application moves through an examination at the USPTO, the original application is usually split into two or mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
