Patent


A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights.
The procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims that define the scope of protection that is being sought. A patent may include many claims, each of which defines a specific property right.
Under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, patents should be available in WTO member states for any invention, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step, and are capable of industrial application. Nevertheless, there are variations on what is patentable subject matter from country to country, also among WTO member states. TRIPS also provides that the term of protection available should be a minimum of twenty years. Some countries have other patent-like forms of intellectual property, such as utility models, which have a shorter monopoly period.

Definition

The word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means "to lay open". It is a shortened version of the term letters patent, which was an open document or instrument issued by a monarch or government granting exclusive rights to a person, predating the modern patent system. Similar grants included land patents, which were land grants by early state governments in the US, and printing patents, a precursor of modern copyright.
In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents something new, useful and non-obvious. A patent is often referred to as a form of intellectual property right, an expression which is also used to refer to trademarks and copyrights, and which has proponents and detractors.
Some other types of intellectual property rights are also called patents in some jurisdictions: industrial design rights are called design patents in the US, plant breeders' rights are sometimes called plant patents, and utility models and Gebrauchsmuster are sometimes called petty patents or innovation patents. The additional qualification utility patent is sometimes used to distinguish the primary meaning from these other types of patents.
Particular types of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method patents, chemical patents and software patents.

History

Although there is evidence that some form of patent rights was recognized in Ancient Greece in the city of Sybaris, the first statutory patent system is generally regarded to be the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474. However, recent historical research has suggested that the 1474 Statute was inspired by laws in the Kingdom of Jerusalem that granted monopolies to developers of novel silk-making techniques. Patents were systematically granted in Venice as of 1474, where they issued a decree by which new and inventive devices had to be communicated to the Republic in order to obtain legal protection against potential infringers. The period of protection was 10 years. As Venetians emigrated, they sought similar patent protection in their new homes. This led to the diffusion of patent systems to other countries.
The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial Revolution could emerge and flourish. By the 16th century, the English Crown would habitually abuse the granting of letters patent for monopolies. After public outcry, King James I of England was forced to revoke all existing monopolies and declare that they were only to be used for "projects of new invention". This was incorporated into the Statute of Monopolies in which Parliament restricted the Crown's power explicitly so that the King could only issue letters patent to the inventors or introducers of original inventions for a fixed number of years. The Statute became the foundation for later developments in patent law in England and elsewhere.
File:Puckle gun advertisement.jpg|thumb|left|James Puckle's 1718 early autocannon was one of the first inventions required to provide a specification for a patent.
Important developments in patent law emerged during the 18th century through a slow process of judicial interpretation of the law. During the reign of Queen Anne, patent applications were required to supply a complete specification of the principles of operation of the invention for public access. Legal battles around the 1796 patent taken out by James Watt for his steam engine, established the principles that patents could be issued for improvements of an already existing machine and that ideas or principles without specific practical application could also legally be patented.
The English legal system became the foundation for patent law in countries with a common law heritage, including the United States, New Zealand and Australia. In the Thirteen Colonies, inventors could obtain patents through petition to a given colony's legislature. In 1641, Samuel Winslow was granted the first patent in North America by the Massachusetts General Court for a new process for making salt.
The modern French patent system was created during the Revolution in 1791. Patents were granted without examination since inventor's right was considered as a natural one. Patent costs were very high. Importation patents protected new devices coming from foreign countries. The patent law was revised in 1844patent cost was lowered and importation patents were abolished.
The first Patent Act of the U.S. Congress was passed on April 10, 1790, titled "An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts". The first patent under the Act was granted on July 31, 1790, to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a method of producing potash. A revised patent law was passed in 1793, and in 1836 a major revision was passed. The 1836 law instituted a significantly more rigorous application process, including the establishment of an examination system. Between 1790 and 1836 about ten thousand patents were granted. By the American Civil War about 80,000 patents had been granted.

Gender gap in patents

The first patent in England known to be granted to a woman was to Mrs. Amye Everard Ball in 1637 for a tincture of saffron.
In the US, married women were historically precluded from obtaining patents. While section 1 of the Patent Act of 1790 did refer to "she", married women were unable to own property in their own name and were also prohibited from rights to their own income, including income from anything they invented. This historical gender gap has lessened over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, however, disparity is still prevalent. In the UK, for example, only 8% of inventors were female as of 2015. This can partly be attributed to historical barriers for women to obtain patents, as well as to the fact that women are underrepresented in traditionally "patent-intensive" sectors, particularly STEM sectors. Marcowitz-Bitton et al. argue that the gender gap in patents is also a result of internal bias within the patent system.

Innovation decline

The number of patent applications filed each year has been growing for most countries although not smoothly, and jumps in activity are often observed due to changes in local laws. The high number of patent families for Spain in the 1800s is related to the superior preservation and cataloguing of the data by Spanish Patent and Trademark Office compared to other countries. The US was the World's leader in terms of patent families filed between 1900 and 1966, when Japan took over. Since 2007 China leads.
However, in most technologically advanced countries, the total number of patent families filed there have been declining in absolute numbers since –1980s. The decline is even more pronounced when the number of patent applications is normalized by the country's population each year, or when the country of origin rather than country of filing is used. For the US, the population-normalized peak in patenting occurred in 1915, and the number of subsequent patents induced per patent has been mostly declining since 1926. A study of 4,512 patents obtained by Stanford University between 1970 and 2020 showed that the university's patenting activity plateaued in the 2010s. Incidentally, only 20% of Stanford patents in that dataset produced a positive net income for the university, while the rest was a net loss.
Similar declines have been noted not only for the number of patents, but also for other measures of innovation output.
Several hypotheses have been proposed as explanations for the observed decline:
  1. increasing cost of doing research, as "lower-hanging fruits have been picked up";
  2. decrease in productivity per researcher; This occurred because factor overwhelms increased efficiency in computation, automation, big data analysis and communication.
  3. human civilization is reaching the limits of the human brain rather than technological limits. "For the first time in history people are bombarded with far more information than they can process."
  4. It has also been suggested that the rate of innovation is proportional to the rate of population growth, and that the observed decline in research productivity is related to the resource-limited Malthusian growth model.
  5. increasing fragmentation of patent encumbrance and increasing number and cost of patent litigations;
  6. decreasing value of patents in post-industrial economies, as businesses prefer less risky and more profitable investments in software rather than in hardware, which can be protected more effectively and at a lower cost by using copyrights, trade secrets, first mover advantage, download limitations. A related decline of manufacturing share in the GDP of post-industrial countries has been reported in some studies.
  7. a slow-down in patent applications in the US has been attributed to court decisions in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International limiting the eligibility of business method and biological patents. Similar restrictions on software patents have been enacted in other countries.
  8. the number of patent applications from China is expected to go down after 2025, when government subsidies for patent filing are to expire.
  9. patents that are registered but not commercialized, as is the case in around 50% of them, function as a barrier to the registration of similar ideas, effectively creating a growing zone of non-patentability.