Patent, What is Patent?

Patents are one of the oldest forms of intellectual property protection and, as with all forms of protection for intellectual property; the aim of a patent system is to encourage economic and technological development by rewarding intellectual creativity.

To be patentable, an invention must also meet certain criteria relating to novelty and other features. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) provides three criteria and conditions for an invention to be patentable.

There are several characteristics that a patent office will look at to determine whether the invention is patentable. At the outset, there has to be a patent application on file. In most cases that patent application is examined by a technical expert to ensure that it meets the substantive criteria for patentability.

1.The first of those criteria is that it has to be new (novel), meaning that the invention must never have been made before, carried out before or used before.

2.The second criterion is that there must have been an inventive step. In other words, it must represent a sufficient advance in relation to the state of the art before it was made to be considered worth patenting. The term "non-obvious" is also used: if it were obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field concerned, it would not progress to the stage qualifying for patent protection.

3.The third criterion is that it needs to be industrially applicable. It has to be susceptible of use in some way. This is a very broad criterion. Almost anything can be used, even if it’s in the research stage, but, as I mentioned, that does not apply to a perpetual motion machine, because it simply will not work.