Saturday, January 6, 2007

Types of Patent (US Patent Law)

Types of Patent
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Utility patents
Most patents are utility patents, so called because they cover "useful" processes and products. This text focuses on utility patents.
A utility patent can cover a physical product (e.g. a chemical compound), or it can cover a process for using a product (e.g. a method for creating a chemical compound). The scope of these concepts has changed over time. For example:
Artificially-created organisms were not patentable as products until the Supreme Court's decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), which held that a genetically-engineered bacterium was a "nonnaturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter" entitled to product protection.
Business methods were not patentable until the Federal Circuit's decision in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1368 (1998), holding that a patentable process need not act on anything tangible.
A utility patent is in effect from the date the patent issues until twenty years from the date the application for patent was filed, so long as periodic maintenance fees are paid.

Design patents
Design patents are awarded to original designs for articles of manufacture. Like utility patents, design patents require novelty and nonobviousness. There is no utility requirement, but there are two other criteria for design patents. First, they must have ornamentality—they must be "the product of aesthetic skill and artistic conception." Design patents must also be not primarily functional. If the design is primarily functional, it should be the subject of a utility patent, not a design patent.
Design patents last for fourteen years.

Plant patents
Plant patents can be granted for any distinct and new variety of asexually-reproducing plant. Overall, plant patents are not as strong as utility patents in terms of protection.
Plant patents last twenty years from the date of application.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.