A patent can be defined as a grant of exclusive rights to an inventor over his invention for a limited period of time. The exclusive rights conferred include the right to make, use, exercise, sell or distribute the invention in India. The term of a patent is twenty years, after the expiry of which, the invention would fall into the public domain.
To be patentable, an invention should fall within the scope of patentable subject matter as defined by the patent statute. The invention must be a product or a process in order to be eligible for patent protection. With regard to medicine or drug and certain classes of chemicals no patent was granted for the product itself even if new, only the process of manufacturing the substance was patentable. After the Patents Amendment Ordinance, 2004, which commenced on January 1st, 2005, the provision relating to food, drugs and other chemicals have been omitted. Both product and process patents are now available for Food and Drugs.
What are the requirements for a patent?
Patents are granted only after the satisfaction of certain requirements, which include the patentable subject-matter, utility, novelty, obviousness and specification
Utility The second requirement for patentability is that the invention be useful. Credible utility requires that logic and facts support the assertion of utility, or that a person of ordinary skill in the art would accept that the disclosed invention is currently capable of the claimed use. The utility must be specific to the subject matter claimed; not a general utility that could apply to a broad class of inventions. Substantial utility requires that the invention have a defined real world use; a claimed utility that requires or constitutes carrying out further research to identify or confirm a use in the context of the real world is not sufficient.
Novelty The novelty requirement described under 35 U.S.C. § 102 consists of of two disctinct requirements; novelty and statutory bars to patentability. Novelty requires that the invention was not known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or another country, prior to invention by the patent applicant. To meet the novelty requirement, the invention must be new compared to the prior art. The statutory bar applies where the invention was in public use or on sale in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or another country more than one year prior to the date of the application for a U.S. patent. In other words, the right to patent is lost if the inventor delays too long before seeking patent protection. An essential difference between the novelty requirement and statutory bars is that an inventor’s own actions cannot destroy the novelty of his or her own invention, but can create a stutory bar to patentability.
How to do a patent registration?
Step 1:Patent Search: a review of the database of patents which have been issued previously
Step 2:Patent Drafting
Step 3:Patent Filing
The whole process of getting a patent registration done involves complex techno-legal considerations.
