Patentable and Non-Patentable inventions

A college student writes an app that splits restaurant bills. A farmer breeds a new variety of rice. A doctor invents a new way of performing a surgery. A scientist finds a bacterium living in the Sundarbans mud. Each of them has done something clever and useful, and each will be told something different when they walk into the patent office. The Patents Act sorts these cases in two steps: first, is it an invention in the statutory sense, and second, is it one of the things the Act says is not an invention at all?

In two minutes

Under the Patents Act an invention is a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application (s.2(1)(j)), but even then nothing is patentable if it falls within the exclusions in s.3 or the atomic energy bar in s.4.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.