A patent is a right granted to an individual or group (such as a company) which permits the grantee the knack to avoid others from making, using, or selling the invention, for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable.
Patents by their techno-legal nature are written in a specific format, thus enabling it difficult to read and understand by a lay man. The focus of this paper is to provide very basic information of a patent document, so that a lay man can easily understand a patent.
There are three main types of patents:
Utility patents are the most common type of patents, and are what people in general indicate when they just say “patent.”
Parts of a patent document
Patents with their techno-legal nature are written in a standard format. A patent document contains following parts:
Bibliographic information
The front page of the patent bibliographic information including patent/publication number, inventor name, the entity to whom patent rights are assigned (generally an inventor assigns a patent to his employer if the invention was conceived as part of his work for that employer), patent number, filing or application date, date of issue, classes and subclasses under which the patent was classified, and the classes searched by the examiner during determination of novelty of the invention, abstract, representative drawing and the title. Sometimes the front page also includes patents and non-patent. They can provide good leads for a patent search.
Description
The description possibly will contain several parts, including:
Claims
Claims in a patent are very important section as it legally determines exactly what the patent covers and what it does not. Claims are critical, both for validity and clearance searches, and for writing a patent application.
Claims are generally of two types “independent claims” and “dependent claims”. Dependent claims are those that rely to a previous claim, and thereby may require that previous claim to be valid for themselves to be valid. This is a very important concept in validity searches, where it is a common strategy to attempt to invalidate mainly the independent claims, to potentially invalidate the dependent claims in the process.
Vinod Kumar Singh
Content Writer - IP/Patent Intelligence
E-mail: vinod.patent@gmail.com
Mobile: +919392387277
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Tags: claims, description, fundamental, patent, patent parts
