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Outline of patents

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intellectual property
Related topics
Higher categories:
Property and Property law

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to patents:

Patent – set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process. Patents are a form of intellectual property.

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Transcription

Hi, I'm Stan Muller. This is Crash Course: Intellectual Property and today we're talking about patent law. That's why I'm wearing these fancy patent leather shoes. They're a little too small and uh, I had a hard time putting them on. If only somebody would invent a new useful and non-obvious tool for forcing feet into too small shoes. Mark, can I take these off now? A patent is a grant by a government that allows an inventor to maintain a monopoly on the use and development of an invention for a limited time. Patents allow inventors to prevent or exclude other people or companies from manufacturing, selling, or using their patented inventions. Governments grant these exclusive rights in exchange for the clear and detailed public disclosure of inventions. So here's the deal. You invent something awesome, explain how you did it in patently obvious terms, we'll let you be the sole owner for a couple of decades or so which should give you enough time to make some money off the thing. Ideally, you'll get rich for your inventive efforts before the term expires or maybe you'll pour all that money into more research and develop new patents. The notion of giving talented inventors and innovators a limited monopoly in exchange for their instructing the rest of their less talented fellow citizens is not new. It's generally accepted that the first systematic patent law was developed in Venice, a hotbed of Renaissance Industrial activity. The 1474 Venetian patent statute sums up the economic rationale of patent law pretty nicely. "We have among us men of great genius, apt to invent and discover ingenious devices; and in view of the grandeur and virtue of our city, more such men come to us every day from diverse parts. Now, if provision were made for the works and devices discovered by such persons, so that others who may see them could not build them and take the inventor's honor away, more men would then apply their genius would discover, and would build devices of great utility and benefit to our commonwealth." Wow. These Venetians really thought a lot of themselves. "Grandeur and virtue of our city." This idea of granting exclusive rights to inventors to encourage discovery, spread throughout Europe, into England and then to the United States, where it was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution. In order for an innovation or invention to be patentable, the invention must satisfy five requirements. We'll look at all of these requirements generally, and we'll look at the patent for our trusty liquid-filled die agitator containing a die having raised indicia on the facets thereof. Magic 8 Ball's patent was issued in 1964 and did it meet all these requirements? Yes. So this seems a little circular, but the first requirement is that the patent's subject matter be patentable. The categories for patentable subject matter are defined as broadly as any process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or improvement thereof. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that anything under the Sun that is made by human beings is patentable. However broad this definition might be, certain things like, the laws of nature, physical phenomenon, abstract ideas, have consistently been held not to be patentable. The distinction here is that the innovation has to be the product of human inventiveness, and not the product of nature. The Supreme Court recently looked at this issue in a 2013 case involving a biotech firm that had isolated human DNA linked to ovarian and breast cancer. The company argued that it had developed an innovative process for looking for mutations that might lead to cancer and isolating. They argued that the isolated genes were the product of human inventiveness and therefore patentable. The court disagreed, finding that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it's been isolated. The Magic 8 Ball is certainly the product of human inventiveness, although it would be fantastic if these were formed by nature, like if they washed up on beaches or maybe there was a Magic 8 Ball tree. I use fantastic here in the sense that this is obviously a fantasy. But, uh, mmm, what a world that would be. So are you patentable subject matter or what? It is certain. The second requirement for patentability is that the invention be useful, which means both that it has some identifiable benefit and that it's capable of being used. Patent law often refers to a person of ordinary skill in the art. What they're talking about here is an engineer or fellow inventor that can understand the technical information included in the patent. This differs from like tort law, where the law often refers to a reasonable person standard. Understanding patents requires a little more technical expertise. I mention this because the second requirement relies on a person skilled in the art to accept that the invention described in the patent is useful and that it works. The Magic 8 Ball is very useful. It functions in the way that the patent claims it does. It displays answers to yes-or-no questions such as, "Should I join the Merchant Marines?" or "Will I die alone?" Are you useful? It is decidedly so. The third requirement for patent protection is that the invention be new or novel. Basically, if somebody else already invented or patented a similar invention, you can't get a patent. Going back to the case of our Magic 8 Ball, despite the fact that its application notes that similar devices exist, the novelty of the 1964 version lies in the shape of the die, which allows for a better question-and-answer experience. Are you novel? Outlook good. The innovation must also be non-obvious. The test for non-obviousness is whether the innovation and the prior art, by which I mean all that which has come before the innovation, are such that the innovation as a whole would not have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made. This is kind of a difficult theoretical task for a judge or patent examiner. Sometimes the most inventive leaps of logic yield solutions that are so elegant that they seem obvious once you've seen it. The Magic 8 ball 1964 patent was for an improvement to the original invention. The inventor added many more sides to the die and also added the all-important raised indicia: the raised lettering, so as to prevent bubbling between the viewing screen and the die. It doesn't seem obvious to me. Magic 8 ball, are you non-obvious? Without a doubt. The final requirement is enablement. Technically, this means "the specification of the patent shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention." Whoever wrote this doesn't understand the terms clear and concise. What they're saying is that the plan submitted with the patent have to be clear and complete enough for someone else to recreate the invention without too much trouble. Beyond this, the applicant has to describe the best mode of making this thing happen. The inventor can't give people the runaround. If there's a best way to recreate the invention in question, the inventor is required to disclose it. This final step is essential to the underlying rationale of patent law. Without a clear and accurate explanation of how to make and use the innovation, the public gets nothing in return for granting the limited monopoly. So, what's it gonna be, Magic 8 ball? Can we make or use you based on the patent's description? As I see it, yes. There are 3 types of patents issued by the Patent & Trademark office: utility patents, design patents, and plant patents. The 5 requirements we just talked about refer to utility patents. Design patents cover any new, original, and ornamental, rather than useful, article of manufacture. Apple is famous for their design patents and their utility patents. Plant patents are granted to persons who first noticed the distinctiveness of a plant, then reproduced it asexually, by grafting or cloning, rather than growing it from a seed. If you grow it from a seed, you can't patent it. The plant must be novel and distinctive to be granted a patent, which basically means that it has to have at least one significant distinguishing characteristic to establish it as a distinct variety. So this is what a plant patent looks like. Not a lot of them get issued relative to utility or design patents. On a related note, the human-made plant, or a plant that's been genetically engineered, can also be the subject of a utility patent. Provided it meets all the 5 requirements we talked about. Often, these are plants that are resistant to certain herbicides or are better suited to shipping. There's even a man-made variety of cotton that's resistant to pests. Patents don't last forever. The term of protection for utility patents is 20 years, measured from the date of filing. There are extensions of up to 5 years allowed for drugs, medical devices, and additives. The current term of protection for design patents is 14 years, and that's also from the date of filing. So patents are all about the money. Let's talk about that in the Thought Bubble. In terms of economic impact, patent law is arguably the most important branch of intellectual property. There are legitimate questions about the role of patents and what types of research and development patent law encourages. Does the law encourage more research into highly lucrative erectile dysfunction medications than stuff like anti-malarial drugs? Should developing nations be able to create public health exceptions for life-saving proprietary medications? If so, then how would companies be able to pay for the development of these medications or future life-saving medications without the assurance of patent protection? And then there are non-practicing entities, often called patent trolls, that go around acquiring huge patent portfolios, and then threaten to sue pretty much everybody. Patent trolls bring these lawsuits despite the fact that they have no interest in developing or manufacturing any actual products. This is their business model. Because of the high cost of litigation, costs can range from about a $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 if this goes to trial and the threat of massive damage awards. Most companies sued by patent trolls settle or agree to pay a licensing fee to the trolls. There's legislation pending in Congress designed to address this issue. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So the policy issues around patents are incredibly complex and controversial, and this video is only a basic overview. The underlying purpose of patent law, which is to reward inventors for their skill and effort, is often in direct opposition to the public's interest in accessing those innovations. Whether it be life-saving medications that costs thousands of dollars per pill or water treatment technologies that developing countries can't afford to license. The trick is to strike a balance between providing inventors with incentives and ensuring public access. How we attain that balance is still very much an open question. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next week. Crash Course Intellectual Property is filmed in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and it's made by all of these nice workers for hire. If you'd like to keep Crash Course freely available for everyone forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love. Speaking of Patreon, we'd like to thank our Headmaster of Learning Thomas Frank and our Vice Principals, Kathy and Tim Philp and Linnea Boyev. Thank you so much for supporting Crash Course. You can get awesome rewards for your support, but you don't get ownership of our Crash Course copyright. You do, however, get to help people learn. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.

What type of thing is a patent?

A patent can be described as all of the following:

  • Property – one or more components (rather than attributes), whether physical or incorporeal, of a person's estate; or so belonging to, as in being owned by, a person or jointly a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation or even a society.
    • Intellectual property – intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.

Types of patents

  • Biological patent – the scope and reach of biological patents vary among jurisdictions,[1] and may include biological technology and products, genetically modified organisms and genetic material. The applicability of patents to substances and processes wholly or partially natural in origin is a subject of debate.[1]
  • Business method patent – includes patents on new types of e-commerce; and on methods of doing business in insurance, banking, tax compliance, etc. A business method may be defined as "a method of operating any aspect of an economic enterprise".[2]
    • Tax patent – discloses and claims a system or method for reducing or deferring taxes. In September 2011, President Barack Obama signed legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that effectively prohibits the granting of tax patents in general.
  • Chemical patent – patent for an invention in the chemical or pharmaceuticals industry. Not a special legal form of patent.
  • Design patent –
  • Essential patent –
  • Insurance patent –
  • Medical patent –
  • Software patent –
  • Submarine patent –

Patent process

  • Patent application – request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for the invention described and claimed by that application. An application consists of a description of the invention (the patent specification), together with official forms and correspondence relating to the application.
    • Divisional patent application – type of patent application which contains matter from a previously filed application (the so-called parent application). Whilst a divisional application is filed later than the parent application, it may retain its parent's filing date, and will generally claim the same priority.
    • Patent drawing – drawing in a patent application that illustrates the invention, or some of its embodiments (which are particular implementations or methods of carrying out the invention), or the prior art. Drawings may be required by law to be in a particular form, and the requirements may vary depending on the jurisdiction.
  • Patent prosecution – interaction between applicants and their representatives, and a patent office with regard to a patent, or an application for a patent. Broadly, patent prosecution can be split into pre-grant prosecution, which involves negotiation with a patent office for the grant of a patent, and post-grant prosecution, which involves issues such as post-grant amendment and opposition.
    • Public participation in patent examination – used in some forms to help identifying relevant prior art and, more generally, to help assessing whether patent applications and inventions meet the requirements of patent law, such as novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness, and sufficiency of disclosure.
  • Patent term adjustment – process of extending the term of a US patent. Its intention is to accommodate for delays caused by the US patent office during the Prosecution of a US patent application. The total PTA is an addition to the 20-year lifespan of a US patent.

History of patents

  • History of patent law – generally considered to have started with the Venetian Statute of 1474 and the 1624 English Statute of Monopolies.[3]
    • History of United States patent law – this started even before the U.S. Constitution was adopted, with some state-specific patent laws. The history spans over more than three centuries.
      • Patent caveat – was a legal document filed with the United States Patent Office. Caveats were instituted by the U.S. Patent Act of 1836, but were discontinued in 1909, with the U.S. Congress abolishing the system formally in 1910.
  • Patent model – was a scratch-built miniature model no larger than 12" by 12" by 12" (approximately 30 cm by 30 cm by 30 cm) that showed how an invention works. It was one of the most interesting early features of the United States patent system.
  • 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire – second of several disastrous fires in the history of the U.S. Patent Office. Its cause was ultimately determined to be accidental. Many patent documents and models from the preceding three decades were irretrievably lost. As a result of the fire, Congress and the newly legally revamped Patent Office changed the way it handled its recordkeeping, assigning numbers to patents and requiring multiple copies of supporting documentation.
    • X-Patents – all the patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office from July 1790 (when the first U.S. patent was issued), to July 1836. The actual number is unknown, but the best estimate is 9,957. The records were burned in a fire, in December 1836, while in temporary storage. No copies or rosters were maintained by the government at the time, leaving only the inventors’ copies to reconstruct the collection.
  • Confederate Patent Office – agency of the Confederate States of America charged with issuing patents on inventions. is known to have issued 266 patents, and likely it issued some more during the early months of 1865. Unfortunately, the records it contained were destroyed in a fire. Very few patent documents issued by the CPO, likely fewer than 10, are known to survive.
  • 1877 U.S. Patent Office fire – second of several disastrous fires in the history of the U.S. Patent Office. It occurred in the Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., on 27 September 1877. Although the building was constructed to be fireproof, many of its contents were not; some 80,000 models and some 600,000 copy drawings were destroyed. No patents were completely lost, however, and the Patent Office soon reopened.
  • Wright brothers patent war – the Wrights' preoccupation with suing infringers and collecting license fees hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1910 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[4] Aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
  • Smartphone patent wars – since 2009, ongoing business battle by smartphone manufacturers including Sony, Google, Apple Inc., Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Xiaomi, and HTC, among others, in patent litigation. The conflict is part of the wider "patent wars" between multinational technology and software corporations.* State Committee on Standardization, Metrology and Patents (Azerbaijan) –

Patent theory

  • Economics and patents – Patents are an incentive system designed to encourage innovation. By conferring rights on the owner to exclude competitors from the market (and thus providing a higher probability of financial rewards in the market place), patents offer the incentive for people to study and create new technology.
  • Prizes as an alternative to patents – Some authors advocating patent reform have proposed the use of prizes as an alternative to patents. Critics of the current patent system, such as Joseph E. Stiglitz, are critical of patents because they fail to provide incentives for innovations which are not commercially marketable.

Patent-related business concepts

  • Patent cliff – phenomena of patent expiration dates and an abrupt drop in sales that follows for a group of products capturing high percentage of a market. Usually, these phenomena are noticed when they affect blockbuster products. A blockbuster product in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, is defined as a product with sales exceeding US$1 billion per year.
  • Patent family – patents for a single invention in multiple countries.
    • Triadic patent – series of corresponding patents filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO), for the same invention, by the same applicant or inventor. Triadic patents form a special type of patent family.
  • Patent holding company – company that holds patents on behalf of one or more other companies but does not necessarily manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents held.
  • Patent portfolio – collection of patents owned by a single entity, such as an individual or corporation. The patents may be related or unrelated. Patent applications may also be regarded as included in a patent portfolio.

Patent-related business strategies and techniques

  • Patent ambush – when a member of a standard-setting organization withholds information, during participation in development and setting a standard, about a patent that the member or the member's company owns, has pending, or intends to file, which is relevant to the standard, and subsequently the company asserts that a patent is infringed by use of the standard as adopted.
  • Defensive patent aggregation – practice of purchasing patents or patent rights to keep such patents out of the hands of entities that would assert them against operating companies.
  • Evergreening – variety of legal and business strategies by which technology producers with patents over products that are about to expire retain royalties from them, by either taking out new patents (for example over associated delivery systems, or new pharmaceutical mixtures), or by buying out or frustrating competitors, for longer periods of time than would normally be permissible under the law.[5]
  • Patent monetization – generation of revenue or the attempt to generate revenue by a person or company by selling or licensing the patents it owns.
  • Offensive patent aggregation – purchasing of patents in order to assert them against companies that would use the inventions protected by such patents (operating companies) and to grant licenses to these operating companies in return for licensing fees or royalties.
  • Open patent – patented invention that can freely be distributed under a copyleft-like license. The invention could be used as is, or improved, in which case the patent improvement would have to be re-licensed to the institution that holds the original patent, and from which the original work was licensed.
  • Patent pooling – forming a consortium of at least two companies who agree to cross-license patents relating to a particular technology. The creation of a patent pool can save patentees and licensees time and money, and, in case of blocking patents, it may also be the only reasonable method for making an invention available to the public.
  • Patent privateering – when a party, typically a patent assertion entity, authorized by another party, often a technology corporation, uses intellectual property to attack other operating companies. Privateering provides a way for companies to assert intellectual property against their competitors with a significantly reduced risk of retaliation and as a means for altering their competitive landscape.
  • Patent troll – person or company who enforces patent rights against accused infringers in an attempt to collect licensing fees, but does not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question, thus engaging in economic rent-seeking.
  • Patent visualisation – application of information visualisation. The number of patents has been increasing steadily, thus forcing companies to consider intellectual property as a part of their strategy. So patent visualisation like patent mapping is used to quickly view patent portfolios.
    • Patent mapping – graphical modeling used in patent visualisation. This practice "enables companies to identify the patents in a particular technology space, verify the characteristics of these patents, and ... identify the relationships among them, to see if there are any zones of infringement." Patent mapping is also referred to as patent landscaping.
  • Patent war – "battle" between corporations or individuals to secure patents for litigation, whether offensively or defensively. There are ongoing patent wars between the world's largest technology and software corporations. Contemporary patent wars are a global phenomenon, fought by multinational corporations based in the United States, China, Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
  • Patent watch – process for monitoring newly issued patents, as well as possibly pending patent applications, to assess whether any of these patent rights might be of interest or might be annoying.

Patent law

Patent courts

Patent-related lawsuits

Patent legislation

Patent treaties

Parties to patent treaties

Patent law by region

Patent administration

Patent offices

Specific patents

Patent-related organizations

Patent-related publications

People associated with patents

Databases and search engines

  • Baidu Patents –
  • Espacenet –
  • Google Patents – search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
  • Patentscope –

See also


References

  1. ^ a b Sharples, Andrew (2011-03-23). "Gene Patents in Europe Relatively Stable Despite Uncertainty in the U.S." Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
  2. ^ "REPORT ON A REVIEW OF THE PATENTING OF BUSINESS SYSTEMS" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-11-03. Retrieved 2015-04-01.
  3. ^ Helmut Schippel: Die Anfänge des Erfinderschutzes in Venedig, in: Uta Lindgren (ed.): Europäische Technik im Mittelalter. 800 bis 1400. Tradition und Innovation, 4. Aufl., Berlin 2001, S.539-550 ISBN 3-7861-1748-9
  4. ^ Boyne, Walter J. "The Wright Brothers: The Other Side of the Coin". wingsoverkansas.com. Archived from the original on 2010-12-03. Retrieved 2009-03-07.
  5. ^ Faunce, Thomas (August 6, 2004). "The awful truth about evergreening". The Age. Retrieved 2007-09-21.

External links

Patent law
Overviews
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By region / country
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See also
Licensing of patents
Overviews
Types
Strategies
Clauses in patent licenses
Higher category: Patents, Patent law

This is a list of topics related to patents.

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This page was last edited on 20 May 2024, at 10:22
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