Prerequisites — Novelty, Inventive Step and Industrial Application

You post a video of your new water-saving tap on Instagram, and a month later you decide to get a patent. Can you still get one? A friend says a similar tap was sold in Pune years ago. A rival says any plumber could have thought of your design. The patent office asks you to file a document describing the invention in full before it will even look at your claim. Each of these is a separate requirement of the Patents Act: novelty, inventive step, industrial application, and a properly drafted specification.

In two minutes

To be patentable an invention must be new (not anticipated by prior publication or use), involve an inventive step (a technical advance or economic significance that is not obvious to a person skilled in the art) and be capable of industrial application, and it must be disclosed in a provisional or complete specification that meets ss.9 and 10.

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.