Patent

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. This is FindLaw’s collection of Patent articles, part of the Intellectual Property section of the Corporate Counsel Center. Law articles in this archive are predominantly written by lawyers for a professional audience seeking business solutions to legal issues. Start your free research with FindLaw.

Intellectual Property

Patent Articles

Patents 101

On December 5, 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada in a five-four decision held, in Harvard College v. Canada (Commissioner of Patents), that higher life forms (in this case, a transgenic mouse) cannot be patented. This is an important decision, and ...
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Patents, Politics, And Cloning

The United States is on the verge of enactment of a law that would inject "pro-life" politics squarely into the patent arena. Indeed, a bill sponsored by Rep. David Joseph Weldon (R-Fla.) would codify the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's existing ...
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Patents, Trademarks & Copyrights

In some cases, the best option may be "none of the above." The formula for Coca Cola. has been kept a "trade secret" for decades. If the formula were copyrighted, it would be publicly available, and others could easily obtain it and copy it. Coca ...
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Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright

Be careful. Is yours a better mousetrap or a mousetrap no one ever thought of before?Read on about patents and trademarks... Patent, in law, the abbreviated term for letters patent, in its most general sense a document issued by a government ...
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Pre-litigation Strategies: Patent Reexamination

This article was originally published in the Spring 2004 edition (Vol. 4, No. 1) of Thelen Reid's Intellectual Property and Trade Regulation Journal. The costs of patent litigation Â– both in terms of time and money Â– have been well documented. For ...
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Protect Your Idea

If the search does not turn up any prior art that would prevent the patenting of the invention, the inventor may now decide to proceed with the preparation and filing of the patent application. The application will include the specification, the ...
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Provisional Application For Patent: What It Is and How to Use It

Since June 8, 1995, the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has offered inventors the option of filing a provisional application for patent which was designed to provide a lower cost first patent filing in the United States and to give U.S ...
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Provisional Patent Applications

Since June of 1995, it has been possible to file a new kind of patent application in the Patent and Trademark Office. This application is called a "provisional" patent application. A provisional application stands in contrast with a "regular" patent ...
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PTO Issues Final Utility Guidelines

The PTO has now issued what it terms the "final version" of the Utility Examination Guidelines to be used by Examiners in their review of patent applications for compliance with the utility requirements, together with an extensive "underlying ...
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PTO Issues Proposed Guidelines for Examination of Computer Implemented Inventions

In response to recent decisions from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the PTO has now issued Proposed Guidelines for examination of computer-implemented inventions. In its Proposed Guidelines, the PTO has explicitly stated that any ...
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