Patents are only as valuable as their enforceability in the courts. The Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals was established to handle all of the nation's patent litigation appeals. They are therefore not of much use in this situation.
Patents are about functional and technical aspects of products and processes, therefore an invention must be capable of being made or used in some kind of industry. However good an idea is, or however elegant its explanation, it cannot be patented unless it is a thing which can be made.
Most of these are clearly seen as a necessary stimulus for the infusion of venture and risk capital in the bio-technology industry; the role patents play in motivating academic researchers is less clear. Some data has been generated about the licensing of biotechnology patents.
Many are regularly issued that defy these maxims. For instance, purified products of nature are generally patentable, assuming that the other requirements of patentability are satisfied. Patents are a far more blunt instrument than copyright, and tend to teach far less than code.
Patents are government-issued legal documents that give inventors exclusive rights to their inventions. They are granted for products or processes that are novel, functional and inventive. Patents are essentially national rights. Although the granting of a European patent is centralized, the applications become a bundle of national patents after granting by a central authority. They are good for 20 years from filing date.
Most are resource intensive, but trademark and copyright registration are also important and available for a much smaller investment. The multi-faceted and thorny protections of IP law can be just as powerful for your company as they are for Nintendo.
Patents are most frequently classified by end results, such as converting iron to steel; but many of them cover algorithms whose use in a program is entirely independent of the purpose of the program. For example, a program to analyze human speech might infringe the patent on a speedup in the Fast Fourier Transform; so might a program to perform symbolic algebra (in multiplying large numbers); but the category to search for such a patent would be hard to predict.
Patents are usually taken out in their country of origin but can be patented in more than one country, often only if it proves successful. They are commercially tradeable assets, and the these rights can be assigned or licensed to third parties,acquired in mergers etc.The holders of licenses or assignments, i.e. Patents are granted for products or processes that are novel, useful, and inventive (new, workable, and ingenious).
In this way, patents serve as a reward for ingenuity. they are more important than competition laws, since patents are in the US constitution. Expansion of subject matter is good because the US leads new subject matter worldwide. They are also being claimed for DNA sequences to be used as research tools.
Often these are not whole genes, but are determined by computer analysis of differences between the individual gene sequences with little or no knowledge about their biological function or usefulness in terms of making a product. Patents are intended to encourage inventions and, above all, the disclosure of inventions.
If a technique will be reinvented frequently, there is no need to encourage more people to invent it; since some of the developers will choose to publish it (if publication is merited), there is no point in encouraging a particular inventor to publish it, not at the cost of inhibiting use of the technique.
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