How long is a patent enforceable

In addition to the national official filing fees, once a patent is granted by the patent office, you must pay maintenance or renewal fees, generally on an annual basis, to maintain the validity of the patent.

In case you decide to patent your invention abroad, you should also consider the relevant official filing fees for each country in question, the translation costs, and the costs of using local patent agents, which is a requirement in many countries for foreign applicants.

In general, an application for a patent must be filed, and the patent granted and enforced, in each country in which you seek patent protection for your invention, in accordance with the law of that country. Therefore, one way of obtaining patents in a number of countries is to file a national patent application with each relevant national patent office.

These have the same effect as applications filed, or patents granted, in the member states of that region. This means that, in certain regions, you can obtain a regional patent from a regional patent office , which is valid in some or all of its member states. If you are seeking patent protection in a number of countries worldwide, a good option is to file an international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty PCT , administered by WIPO.

Any resident or national of a state party to the PCT contracting state can file a single international application which has the effect of a national patent application and certain regional patent applications in some or all PCT contracting states. In some cases, this can be a more straightforward choice than choosing to try to submit individual applications in each and every country in which you require protection. Find out more about the PCT System. The first step in securing a patent is the filing of a patent application.

Many patent offices provide a specific form to fill in. In some patent offices, you can file a patent application on line. In the patent application, in general, you must describe the title of the invention, as well as provide an indication of its technical field. You must also include the background to and a description of the invention, in clear language and enough detail that a person with an average understanding of the field could use or reproduce the invention.

Such descriptions are usually accompanied by visual materials such as drawings, plans, or diagrams to better describe the invention and an abstract, which contains a brief summary of the invention. In addition, depending on the applicable patent law, you may need to submit various kinds of statements, declarations or supporting documents to a patent office.

In view of the complexity it is recommended that you consult a patent attorney or a patent agent to prepare a patent application. The procedures vary significantly from one country to another, so it is impossible to provide an exhaustive step-by-step overview.

However it is recommended that you consult either a practicing lawyer specializing in IP or the relevant IP office. Consult our directory of national and regional IP offices. The grant of a patent can be challenged either via a patent office or in a court of law. A court may invalidate or revoke a patent upon a successful challenge by a third party. In addition, many patent offices provide administrative procedures that allow third parties to oppose to the grant of a patent including so-called "opposition systems" , for example, on the basis that the claimed invention is not new or does not involve an inventive step.

Procedures for challenging patents differ from country to country. Find out more about opposition systems. In some countries, patent protection may be extended beyond 20 years or a Supplementary Protection Certificate SPC may be issued in very specific cases.

The extension aims to compensate for the time expended on the administrative approval procedure before products can be put on the market. The time taken for this procedure means that the patent owner may sometimes not be able to benefit from his right for a considerable period of time after the grant of the patent. Possibly, but laws and practices in this regard can differ from one country or region to another. In other countries, such requirements do not exist, meaning that in these countries software is generally patentable subject matter.

However this does not mean that all software will be able to be patent protected. In order to obtain a patent, a software invention must not fall under other non-patentable subject matter for example, abstract ideas or mathematical theories and has to fulfill the other substantive patentability criteria for example, novelty, inventive step [non-obviousness] and industrial applicability [usefulness].

It is therefore recommended that you consult a practicing lawyer specializing in intellectual property or the intellectual property offices of those countries in which you are interested in obtaining protection. Consult our directory of national and regional intellectual property offices to get in contact with a local IP professional, or browse the WIPO Lex database of intellectual property legislation from around the world. Find out more about using patents to protect software and business methods.

Should a patent turn out not to be a viable option for your software-related invention, then using copyright as a means of protection may be an alternative. In general, computer programs are protected under copyright as literary works.

The protection starts with the creation or fixation of the work, such as software or a webpage. Moreover, in general, you are not required to register or deposit copies of a work in order to obtain copyright protection. However, according to a well-established principle, copyright protection extends only to expressions, not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation, or mathematical concepts as such.

Thus many companies protect the object code of computer programs by copyright, while the source code is kept as a trade secret. Find out more about copyright. Whether you can obtain patent protection for an app depends on which element of your app you wish to protect. If you want to protect a technical idea or feature relating to the app, patent protection is a potential option. Depending on the applicable national law, the software that runs your app may be able to be protected by patents if it has certain technical features.

You must be mindful however that your technical idea must meet all of the patentability requirements to obtain patent protection, and it may take years to get a patent. In addition, it is important to ask yourself which element s of your app should be protected from free use by competitors. The software that runs your app can be protected by copyright potentially also by patents , as described above.

If you are interested in protecting logos or signs contained within your app however, you should consider protecting them using trademarks. Inventors must carefully monitor the lifespan of their patent rights.

Chronological Limitations of Patent Protection Patent protection usually ends when the patent expires. Here are the most common expiration dates for most types of patents: For all utility patents filed before June 8, , the patent term is 20 years from date of filing, or 17 years from date of issuance, whichever period is longer. Utility patents, the most common type of patent, are issued for useful inventions that are novel. For utility patents filed on or after June 8, , the patent term is 20 years from the date of filing.

For design patents, the period is 14 years from date of issuance. Design patents are issued for ornamental designs of functional items. For plant patents, the period is 17 years from date of issuance. Plant patents are issued for fruits, seeds, and plants. Other Barriers to Ongoing Patent Protection A patent may expire if its owner fails to pay required maintenance fees to the U.

Stages of a Patent's Life Beyond the duration of the patent referenced above, inventors should be familiar with a patent's overall life stages. The law actually recognizes five distinct "rights" periods in the life of an invention: Invention conceived but not yet documented.

When an inventor conceives an invention, but hasn't yet made any written, signed, dated, and witnessed record of it, the inventor has no rights whatsoever. Invention documented but patent application not yet filed. After making a proper, signed, dated, and witnessed documentation of an invention, the inventor has valuable rights against any inventor who later conceives the same invention and applies for a patent. The invention may also be treated as a "trade secret"—that is, kept confidential—which gives the inventor the legal right to sue and recover damages against anyone who immorally learns of the invention for example, through industrial spying.

Patent pending patent application filed but not yet issued. During the patent pending period, including the one-year period after a provisional patent application is filed, the inventor's rights are the same as in Period 2, above. In response to patent owner and public inquiry, the USPTO is providing a downloadable patent term calculator as a resource to help the public estimate the expiration date of a patent.

The calculator can be used to estimate the expiration dates of utility, plant, or design patents. The calculator contains prompts to enter specific information related to the patent in order to help in estimating expiration dates.

Download the calculator by right-clicking the link below and selecting the option to save the file to your computer. Creating additional local copies or renaming the files will not alter the calculations. Please enable macros in order to use all features of the calculator. Do not try to use the file by simply clicking on it and opening it using a viewer embedded in your web browser - the calculator will not work properly unless the file has been saved locally and opened in MS Excel software.

Design patents strictly protect the particular decorative features of a manufacturer's item, as opposed to its role. Determining the term of a patent gets complicated, however, if you have more than one filing date. If you have more than one filing date, be careful; it can become unclear exactly how long the term is for the patent. To know the duration of your patent term, keep track of the patent filing date.

Thankfully, the patent office records filing dates and keeps them as a part of the patent record, as well as in public databases. All patents have filing dates.

According to the law, a patent lets the holder keep others from creating, selling, or using the invention for the specified period of time. When you are granted a patent, the government is basically allowing you to have a short-term monopoly over an invention.

This monopoly will last for the duration of the patent. To keep your patent valid, however, you must pay an annual maintenance fee.

If you hold a valid U. Patent rights allow you to restrict who can use, make, or sell your invention. If you fail to pay your required annual maintenance fee, the USPTO will consider your patent abandoned.

Basically, this means that you will no longer have exclusive rights to your invention, and other people can use and profit from your idea. Patents have the shortest lifespan of any type of intellectual property protections. When filing a provisional patent application , it's important to remember that the domestic priority date does not have an impact on when the year term of your full, non-provisional patent will begin.

This is described more fully in 35 U. The year term of a non-provisional patent is based on the filing date of this application. In your application, however, you can claim a priority date based on your provisional application. For instance, if you file a provisional application and then later file an application for a full utility patent, you would have two different filing dates. Provisional patent applications will allow you to protect your invention for one year.

Provisional applications can help work in the owner's favor by getting the ball rolling. The benefit of this is it's quick and inexpensive. It buys the owner a year to continue running experiments, researching, and even building prototypes before they buy into a longer-term patent.

Later on, they can file a non-provisional application. The filing date starts on the provisional application date if you choose to go that route. Otherwise, it starts on the non-provisional, or utility, application filing date.

Keep in mind, filing a provisional application means your patent term will expire earlier, up to as much as a year. Essentially, you are trading a year of your patent term for a year of work on your invention.

Having a patent pending status , much like having a provisional patent application, ultimately limits patent life. The date you file for a patent pending status acts as the filing date for the overall patent. With all these different filing dates, the first one is often named the priority date. Patent pending cannot actually enforce a patent. The office must allow claims as well as issue your inventions patent before any enforcement can ensue.