Law 2101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Patent Office, Public Knowledge, Morning Sickness
Document Summary
Patents protect the actual invention, not the idea for the invention. Patents give the owner exclusive rights to practice (make, use, or sell) an invention: the trade-off = if you contribute it to public knowledge, we"ll give you 20 years of exclusivity. E. g. , bike: compositions, usually a formulation e. g. , drug, process. Improvements on any of these: many patents filed are improvements on existing patented inventions. Patents don"t arise automatically like trademarks and copyrights: must be issued by federal gov. To be patented, an invention must be: new, a disclosure concept, not an invention concept, don"t need to have invented it. You just cant disclose to the public 12-month window. If you"ve disclosed your invention to the public (by selling, distributing, or presenting it), more than a year before you apply for the patent, then it"s no longer patentable bc it"s no longer new. Conflict b/w novelty requirement and the way that scientific work is done.
