Inventions, legal protection

The legal protection of inventions by means of patents is a necessity in order to be able to exert the monopolistic power mentioned above and to provide incentives for its continual creation. 

The Future of Patenting Draft European Directive on the Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions... 

Patent protection is limited geographically. For the most part, a U.S. patent does not provide legal protection from, or prevent, an act occurring outside the United States (and its territories and possessions), although that same act would fall within the scope of patent protection if carried out in the United States (the one exception is discussed in Section 4). The same is generally true for other countries. Thus, a comprehensive patent strategy should take into account the possibility of obtaining patent protection in all countries where an invention will be exploited (i.e., sold, manufactured, or used). 

Directive 98/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 1998 on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions. Available http //europa.eu.int/ smartapi/cgi/sga doc smartapi celexapi prod CELEXnumdoc lg=EN numdoc= 31998L0044 model=guichett. 

Priority date of the first depostlton or application for legal protection of in dustrial properties e.g, a patent or utility model. This date is important for additional applications in other countries which are for the same invention, patent family. 

The legally trained member of the interdisciplinary committee should provide insight as to the significance of the technological advance and as to whether any commercial product ultimately derived from the invention could be protected by an issued patent. Another important function of this person is to determine the scope of the invention based on preceding events, pubHcations, or activities which may have otherwise limited the breadth of the invention. To this end, U.S. law requires that an invention satisfy a number of prerequisites or requirements before issuing a patent novelty, nonobviousness, utiHty, and disclosure. 

The need to deposit viable cultures of microorganisms to meet the legal requirement of providing a sufficient or enabling disclosure of the invention represents a substantial business risk of giving competitors a head start in their R D if no worthwhile patent protection is obtained ultimately. In other technical areas only information describing the invention is disclosed, and not actual physical materials that either embody the invention or that are very closely related to the invention. 

In academic environments, the establishment of industrial property and technology transfer offices has arisen from the increased activities to protect inventions, the need to transfer technologies to enable their production, and from legal requirements for obtaining patents, all driven... 

When it comes to the legal requirements for the protection of intellectual property the position is not so clear-cut. For instance in the US the PTO issues patents on the basis of the date of invention, i.e. the date in the laboratory notebook, not the date of application as is the case with other countries. 

Patent law comprises a vast body of legal practice and court decisions. The patent system is designed to protect inventions and new discoveries, and most chemical companies retain legal counsel in this field. 

Patent literature is a useful source of technical, legal, and commercial information. It is extremely rich in technical information. In a patent application, applicants must disclose the invention in a sufficiently clear and complete way for a person skilled in the art to be able to reproduce the invention. New and inventive concepts give rise to a considerable number of refinements, improvements and modifications. Often, the importance of an invention is related to the number of patents and patent applications which protects it. 

The patent literature consists of much more than granted patents. To obtain a patent, the owner of a new invention must file a patent application with a detailed disclosure of the method for making and using the invention. This disclosure, known as a specification, is published as part of a patent document. The specification contains a set of claims which are numbered sentences that set forth the limitations of the invention to be protected. Before patent rights are granted, a patent examiner reviews the claims to determine whether they meet the legal requirements for patentability, and a patent is granted only if one or more of the claims meets those... 

Few pharmaceutical companies would venture into a long and expensive development programme without a strategy for effective patent protection in place to ensure market exclusivity. Patents are legal property which prevent others using the invention (for 20 years in most countries) in exchange for a full public disclosure of information. 

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