Patents
A new product or process may be subject to ownership with exclusivity for a period of up to 20 years and its correct protection may represent the difference between the success and failure of a company or institution. Successful companies know how to create an innovative environment, identifying therefore opportunities and aiming the correct protection of their patrimony.
When should I request a patent application?
When there is a creation of new products or methods to produce the products. Obtaining the patent is a legal resource that stimulates, through the innovation, the market and its investors.
Is there a term to apply for the protection of your invention?
Before the little-known culture of the industrial creation protection system, we are often facing situations where the inventor decides to obtain only the protection to his/her innovation, years after its disclosure, when he/she realizes that it has been copied by the competition.
The law establishes that the inventor shall request the protection to his/her Invention Patent or Patentable Improvement within a term of 12 months as of its disclosure, and that term shall be of only 6 months in the event of Industrial Design, under penalty to lose the right to do so.
A register application that is not in accordance with that terms may be denied if a competitor submits to INPI any evidence of a prior disclosure carried by the inventor himself/herself, transforming the invention in a state of the art.
Therefore, in the events of protection industrial innovations, the object to be protected shall remain in confidentiality until the INPI file is carried out, or, in the event of a prior disclosure within the said grace period, such condition shall be mentioned to INPI at the moment of the filing, which may or may not request an evidence of that fact, as the case may be.
Invention Patent and Patentable Improvement
The Invention Patent (IP) shall be the requirements of novelty, inventive business and industrial application; the Patentable Improvement (PI) shall be an object of practical use, or part if it, susceptible to industrial application, which presents a new shape or pattern, involving an inventive act and resulting in a functional improvement to its use or manufacturing.
The IP is granted for an invention considered effectively new anywhere in the world and not only in Brazil, concretely resolving an existent problem and meeting the three abovementioned requirements .
An example of an invention protected by IP is the bicycle created by the German Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Drais (1785 – 1851).
The PI requires a lower nonobviousness level and protects an innovation providing a functional improvement to the use or manufacturing of an object already existent.
A significative difference between Invention Patents and Patentable Improvements is the expiration term. While the IP is valid for 20 years as of the file with INPI or at least 10 years as of the grant, the PI is valid for 15 years, with a minimum protection of 7 years as of the grant.
Are the inventions carried out by employees owned by whom?
This is an important issue that might be handled with transparency by businessmen and employees, in order to integrate an object strategy to promote the inventive business, with a positive repercussion for the conflict with the competition.
Law 9279/96 brings some rules:
· The invention is exclusively owned by the employer when it results from the nature of the services in which the employee was hired;
· The invention will be exclusively owned by the employee, provided that the employement agreement is terminated and does not result from the use of employer resources and facilities.
· The invention property shall be common, in equal parts, when it results from the employee personal contribution and the use of the employer resources and equipment.
I am developing a product. How can patents help me?
The patent system exists, among other reasons, for encouraging people to research and develop new products and processes, carrying out, in a first moment, an exchange between society and inventor.
One hand, the patent owner receives an exclusively period for the exploitation, on the other hand, the obligation to publish the contents of the applications, then, there is a large public world database for making researches, allowing people to develop products not from scratch.
The interested party may use the database to produce something that is already in public domain or part of the state of the art.
If the person or company already developed or has been developing something and interested to protect it, it is recommended that, before the application, he/she/it makes researches and technical comparisons in the database to learn if the object of his/her/its creation or improvement is new and not obvious, in addition to analyze if it complies with the patentability requirements, upon the support of a patent expert before taking any decision, because the application of patents has several rules.
When the interested party obtains the grant of his/her/its patent, he/she/it will have in hands for a while a strong instrument for the exclusive exploitation, sale or licensing.
Relation between software and patent
The software has a logical support, consisting of an organized set of instructions causing the operation of a computer program. The patent is the protection granted by the Government for inventions presenting a novelty, business or inventive act and industrial application.
Law No. 9.609/98 provides a term of 50 years for software protection, and Law No. 9.279/96 provides a term of 15 or 20 years for patent protection.
If the software depends on a hardware that is essential for its operation, the hardware may be protected by patent, while the patent, when it is implemented with the use of a software, may include the computer program in its protection field, provided that the patent claim is not harmful to the program.
What are the costs involved
Our costs involve from the application writing for filing until the follow-up of the due measures with INPI.