Patents: Patent Basics

Under United State law, there are four classe on intellectual property:

• Patents - Give inventors and their assignees the exlusive right to manufactrue and sell useful inventions for a limited period of time, in exchange for disclosure of the information someone would need to replicate the invention.
• Copyrights - Giveauthors, artists and other creators Oand their heirsP exclusive right to publish,  perform and create derivative works from a tangible expression of an idea, including print, audio, video, artworks, etc., for a limited period of time.
• Trademarks and Service Marks - Give exclusive rights to the names, designs and other distinctive features used to identify a particulr product or service. Trademarks do not expire, unless the owner fails to continue using or renewing them.
• Trade Secrets - Formulations or processes wich are kept secret by the owners are legally protected against industrial espionage. They may be kept indefinitely, but are not protected against reverse egineering.

Patents are a monopoly on the naufacture and sale of an invention granted to an inventor or group of inventors by a national government. The invenotr must applied for a patent in each country in which they wish to protect their invention, though there are international organizations (such as the World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO) which can simplifiy applying across multiple countries. Each nation determines the rules for patents in its jurisdiction, such as filing rules, duration, and so on. The rules in the sections below are the rules under United States law.

All the various patents fro a single invention form what is called a patent family. Some indexes to the patent literature allow you to easily view all members of a patent family.

What are patent families?

In order to protect an invention in multiple countries, patents must be applied for in each country.  These applications covering the same invention constitute a patent family. Pentent applictions may be divided or combined in differenct countries, and different forms of the application may contain different information, so long as the basic claims remain the same. As a result, it can be informative to look at all the members of a patent family when examining a particular invention. Some patnet databases (including Derwent Innovations Index and SciFinder-n) collect patent family information for each invention they index.

The United States government issues three types of patents:

• Utility patents -for useful inventions. Teses are the vast majority of patents. They last for 20 years
• Design patents - Cover decorative . or visual aspect of a manufactured item. The last for 15 years.
• Plant patents  - Cover discovered or bred cultivated plants (not plants found in the wild) that are propagated asexually, such as by grafting. They last for 20 years.

Types of inventions covered by patents:

• Machines -- includes means of production and consumer goods.
• Manufactures -- mainly consumer goods
• Designs -- e.g. packaging, decoration
• Plants -- agriculture, horticulture
• Processes -- including chemical ones
• Compositions of matter -- i.e. chemical substances , such as drugs, polymers, pesticides, dyes, etc. This category has also been used to encompass patented genes and genetically modified organisms. Note that chemical substances may be claimed in a patent that have not actually been synthesized.

To be patentable, an invention must have: 

• Novelty - The invention must be "new"; not existing in "prior art". Prior art can be anything that is publicly available - an invention already  on sale, or an ealier patent (even if it is expired), or a journal article. That is why inventors seeking patents need to carefully search the literature to determine whether their invention is really new.
• Unobviousness -- The invention must not be obvious to an observer "skilled in the art". If the invention is just a trivial variation on prior art, it won't be granted a patent.
• Utility -- The invention must be useful. You can't patent a compound; only a use for a compound. For example, if you obtain a patent on the use of a subtance as a floor wax, you could not prevent someone else from using it (or even getting a patent on it) as a dessert topping. Note that under current U.S. law, the inventor need not provide a working model of the invention to obtain a patent.

The patent application must disclose:

• Explanation of the utility of the invention
• Enough detail so that someone "skilled in the art" could reproduce it
• Indication of the "best choice" if more than one alternative is described. (This frequently comes up in chemical and drug patents.)

This disclosure of information is what the inventor trades for the monopoly grated by the patent. The idea is to allow others to build on the ' however, if invention to create new and original inventions. If an inventor wishes to keep the details of their invention private, they may keep it a trade secret; however, if someone else reverse-engineers the formula or process or mechanism, the original inventor would have no legal recourse to prevent them from manufacturing or selling it.

• For example, see Häberlein, Nies and Scheidl, "Organic Phosphites and Their Use as Stabilizers"
• Bibliographic information
  • U.S. patent number -- 4,129,553
    This is the patents ID number. They are assigned sequentially starting with the first U.S. patent (issued under George Washington...with Thomas Jefferson as patent examiner...and it was a chemical patent!) If the patent has not yet been granted, the application number will be in this position.
  • Publication date -- Dec. 12 1978
    This is the key date for patent priority. Until March, 2001, this was the date that the patent was granted. Now, U.S. patents are published upon application.
  • Title -- ORGANIC PHOSPHITES AND THEIR USE AS STABILIZERS
    Note that patent titles can be very terse and general and need not fully describe the nature of the invention.
  • Inventors -- Harald Häberlein, Herbert Nies, Franz Scheidl, all of Gersthofen, Fed. Rep. of Germany
    This field gives the name(s) of the inventor(s) and their cities and countries of residence.
  • Assignee -- Hoechst Akteingesellschaft, Frankfurt am Mein, Fed. Rep. of Germany
    The assignee is the person or corporation to whom the inventors have assigned the patent, that is, the real owner of the patent. City and country information is included.
  • Application Number -- 799,277
    Application numbers are assigned as patent applications are received. A new cycle of application numbers starts at the beginning of each year.
  • Filing date -- May 23, 1977
    This is the date that the patent office received the application. Notice that the time lag between filing and issuance is about 18 months. This was the standard prior to 2001. The filing date is crucial for determining priority - who had the invention first.
  • International Patent Classes -- C07F 9/02; C08K 9/36; C08K 5/10; C08K 5/06
    These are classification codes from the World Intellecutal Property Organization (WIPO), used as standardized subject terms for patents. WIPO maintains a list of the IPC codes on their website at http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en. In this case, the codes stand for the following:C07F 9/02
    • -- Organic chemistry of compounds containing phosphorus
    • C08K 9/36 -- Organic additives to polymers containing phosphorus (Note: this code has changed since 1977.)
    • CO8K 5/10 -- Organic additives to polymers containing esters
    • C08K 5/06 -- Organic additives to polymers containing ethers, acetals, ketals or ortho-esters.
    Note that patent classification codes are revised from time to time. This patent would have used the second version of the IPC codes, in effect from July 1, 1974 to the end of 1979. Currently, a new version goes into force each year on January 1st.
  • U.S. Patent Classifications -- 260/45.85 R, etc.
    This is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's own system of classification codes. The first one, listed in boldface, is the primary classification. The USPTO offers a guide to the current classification codes at http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/  Note that other patent offices may have their own classification systems.  The USPTO and the European Patent Office (EPO) have recently developed a joint system, the Cooperative Patent Classification system, which has replaced the EPO's ECLAT system, and is planned to eventually replace the U.S. classification codes, though no date has been set.  For more information see the CPC site at http://www.cooperativepatentclassification.org/  The USPTO site above now includes the CPC code definitions as well as the USPC codes. 
  • Field of Search -- 260/399, etc.
    These are the patent classes searched by the patent examiner in an attempt to locate relevant prior art.
  • References Cited -- 2,711,401, etc.
    These are documents cited by the patent examiner in reviewing the patent application. These may be of interest to a researcher attempting to find more information related to the patent.
• Main Text:
  • Abstract -- A short summary of the patent. Frequently, these abstracts are not very detailed or informative.
  • Description -- This section gives the background of the invention, and may cite other patents or journal articles. It sets forth the general description of what the patent covers and what makes it distinctive from possible prior art.
  • Examples -- This section sets forth specific instances of the invention, generally the best cases.
  • Claims -- These are the legal specifics of the invention which the inventor deems novel, useful and inobvious.
• Note that patents are written in a language which may be far different from that which the inventors would use in a journal article about the same topic. It is legal language, designed to conceal as much as to reveal. This is why corporations use specialist patent searchers who can ferret out the nuggets of technical information from the pile of patent language.