US patent law

Table 4.1 Some products of nature that are generally patentable under US patent law. Additional patenting criteria (e.g. utility) must also be met. For many products, the patent will include details of the process used to purify the product. However, process patents can be filed, as can use patents. Refer to text for further details...

The utility requirement under US patent law has always been stricter, to the extent... 

C-49] Richards, J., US Patent Law and Practice with Special reference to the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industries, 2002, www. ladas.com... 

Although the same basic rules on the priority apply to USA patent applications, two special provisions of the US patent laws should be mentioned which have some influence on the effective priority date of an invention. 

Identifying the true inventor is very important in the United States. According to the US patent law, any failure to designate the true inventor is a cause for invalidation of a patent. 

According to the American law of patents, the criterion of inventive step is replaced by the criterion of unobviousness. Nonobvious subject matter and conditions for patentability are set forth in Section 103 of the US Patent Law which states that ... 

Westerlund L (2002). Biotech Patents Equivalency and Exclusions under European and US Patent Law, Kluwer Law International, New York, pp. 351. 

Asking appropriate questions can also stimulate conceptual adaptation. For example, we are working on the development of a new type of a vacuum cleaner. One of the participants has brought to our brainstorming session a recently developed Roomba 880 vacuum cleaner, which is a robotic device and is considered to be one of the most advanced vacuum cleaners on the market. Several US patents protect its design, but we still may adapt some of its ideas without violating US patent laws. Here we have examples of questions ... 

On 9 September 1958, ffie US Patent Office declared interference (a procedure carried out by US Patent law according to which the Board of Patent Appeals in the US Patent Office determines the priority of two or more inventions of identical or similar claim content with time overlap) between these five parties. Neither the parties nor the US Patent Office had considered including Karl Ziegler s patent rights in this proceeding. 

We should perhaps note that US patent law is now internationally harmonized (since June 1995) and mandates a patent term of 20 years beginning on the date on which the application is filed, as compared to the previous 17-year term from publication, or 20 years from filing, whichever is longer, so such extended patent dialogues, as we have seen several examples of in this overview, with their resultant economic impact, are unlikely to be repeated. 

After completing the process of claim construction, POE, and the NPTF-IG key phrases extraction methodology, the target patent and the related prior art patents are analyzed to identify patent novelty. An invention is patentable if it satisfies specifications for novelty. Novelty is defined in Section 102 of the US Patent Law The invention is novel if it was not previously patented, described in a publication, in public use, or on sale by others before the inventor invented it. Trappey et al. [35] use non-exhaustive overlap clustering to analyze patent documents with multiple technical descriptions of the invention. The results show that key phrases... 

The words of a patent claim define the scope of the intellectual property right represented by the patent. Under US patent law, [t]he specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention . Similarly, under the EPC, [t]he claims shall define the matter for which protection is sought. They shall be clear and concise and be supported by the description . The claims, then, are like a deed to a piece of property defining what intellectual property is within the patent and what intellectual property is outside the patent. 

Figure 12 shows that the Japanese patent has the priority but the patent publication had not arrived at Chemical Abstracts Service at the time the abstract was written about the European patent. The situation is particularly difficult with American patents because under US patent law there is only one step after application Only when the patent is granted is the document published (see example in Sect. 2.6). That means, if a US patent document is cited everybody knows that the patent has been granted. In all other patent processes the patent document will be published as an application and later once again when it is granted. With a European patent application the priority has to be named -this gives, in the case of a patent family, the cross-reference to the parent patent - and will be cited in the corresponding CA abstracts. 

Rapid and broad access to the ever-expanding results of genomic research will undoubtedly result in new and improved therapies for a wide range of disease states. The issue of patents covering genomic inventions and access to these inventions for research purposes is the subject of intense debate both in the US and Europe. Strong patent laws encourage the innovation necessary for the development of new and enhanced therapies. 

A more detailed discussion on EPO and US case law relating to biotechnological inventions can be found in The European Patent Office s Case Law on the Patentability of Biotechnology Inventions , Jaenichen, H.-R., Carl Heymanns Verlag KG, Koln, Germany. 

All of this preliminary material sets the stage for the crux of our present inquiry, What is obvious This is a key inquiry for patent law and one of the most crucial yet challenging concepts to understand because its meaning goes to the core of the definition of inventiveness. We have seen and reviewed novelty and should well understand its predicates. Unlike novelty, however, obviousness is a much more open-ended inquiry. Whereas novelty instructed us that we were limited to a single reference, obviousness can be based on information separately incorporated from... 

GATT is one of the latest attempts at global patent harmonization, that is, amending patent laws everywhere so that they are more or less alike, mostly more. For example, as a result of GATT, many process countries have agreed to grant compound per se patents. This recent (1994) treaty has had significant impacts on US patent practice,... 

Another diminution in the value of patents in the United States is the result of the Hatch-Waxman Act. This law provides a significant economic incentive to generics companies to attack the validity of US patents. (See Chapter 29 for a more complete discussion on this subject.)... 

Concerning the United States patent law (Patent — Act US Code Title 35 — Patents), Section 101 of the Patent Act states ... 

This chapter will provide the reader with an overview of patenting in the pharmaceutical biotechnology industry and summarize some of the key legal and ethical issues related to the patenting of biomedical products and processes. It will examine the legal aspects of patenting before considering the ethical and policy issues. This essay will focus primarily on the U S patent laws, which are very similar to the European patent laws. The essay will note some differences between the US and European laws, and it will mention some relevant international intellectual property treaties. 

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