Introduction
Patents are a different animal altogether. There are a few reasons why you must have a science, or engineering degree, and a law degree, and do a legal apprenticeship (called articles) and pass a whole bunch of difficult exams before you get to call yourself a patent attorney.
One of these reasons is that patents concern new inventions. This simple phrase, ‘new inventions’, actually embraces quite a lot. Whether an invention is ‘new’ is core to the whole process — as we have seen with designs. In addition, the ‘invention’ part can make things a bit complicated.
Firstly, inventions are found in extremely wide fields covering commerce, trade and industry. Just think of pharmaceuticals, for example. There are literally thousands and thousands of valid patents covering pharmaceutical drugs alone. Looked at in a certain way, an invention means going one step further. Hence, assessing and advising whether a pharmaceutical product you have developed is one step further than all the inventions out there, or an infringement of any of the existing thousands of patents, takes skill, experience and knowledge.
Pharmaceutical drugs are not the only things which can be patented. Any invention, provided it is capable of being used or applied in trade or industry or agriculture, can be patented — from a kitchen utensil to a nanotechnology human microchip implant.
In this chapter, we will take a walk through the basics of patent law and unpack some of the more significant features which you might come across now and again.