Patent Law

Intellectual Property Rights | Patent Law

An Intellectual Property Rights, The patent law is to encourage scientific research, new technology and industrial progress. The Patent is granted to encourage inventions and to secure the inventions which are worked in India on a commercial scale without any delay. Patent is a monopoly right granted by the patent office.

The fundamental principles of patent law are that a patent is granted for an invention which must be new, useful and non-obvious. Novelty and utility are factors to be considered. It is essential for the validity of a patent that it must be inventors own discovery as opposed to mere verification of what was already known before the date of the patent. The invention must be non obvious to a person in the art to which the invention relates.

 A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention. A patent provides the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention. The term of the patent is usually 20 years from the filing date of provisional or complete specification.

The patent is of two kinds namely product patent and process patents. A product patent is one where the patent holder has the absolute right to produce and market the product.  A process patent is one where the exact process of the product is patented. In order to avail the benefits conferred under the patent law, the applicant has to disclose its specification. He can also prevent others from infringing his rights who imitate the patent without his consent or without paying royalties to him for a fixed period.

For an Invention it should satisfy the following conditions namely it should be new product or process, it must involve an inventive step and it must be capable of industrial application.

The salient features of patent law are as follows

• The patent must be in respect of an invention and not a discovery.
• In respect of one single invention there must be one single patent.
• A patent may be in respect of a substance or in a respect of a process.
• In order to grant a patent, complete specification and claims should be clearly written without any confusion.

Under the Patent law, there are few treaties and conventions for patent namely patent co operation treaty -1970, Budapest treaty -1980, the Paris convention for the protection of industrial property -1967 and the agreement on trade related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS).