History of Patents and Patent Law
Although documents that can be referred to in modern terms as patents my go back as far as the ancient Greeks, the legal protection as we know it received it’s origin in the year 1474, when the Republic of Venice issued a decree in which all “new and inventive devices” which had been put into public use or practice, had to be reported to the Republic officials in order to protect the device’s owner and protect others from using them free gratis.
The use of patent documents became law in England in the year 1623 when the government of King James I passed a law in which patent rights could only be granted for “projects of new invention”. The law was amended further in the reign of Queen Ann, around 1710, when it was required that a written description of the invention or process had to be submitted in order for a patent to be granted. In the early days of the United States government, English law was used as the basis for American jurisprudence and this applied also to the subject of patents. Thus, the first American patent laws were formulated in 1790 when the U.S. adopted the first U.S. Patent Act.
Patent law on an international scale was boosted by the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1883. This convention formulated a wide range of rules related to patents, including the right to claim priority for the design or device and to file the patent during a period of up to one year by any member state of the Convention.
During the past century, a number of patent laws have been passed by governments in various countries to cover a wide range of inventions, devices, concepts; and especially in regards to what is now known of intellectual property, or simply IP. Some of these laws include laws passed under Title 35 of the U.S. Patent Code under the United States Patent and Trademark Office, including the American Inventors Protection Act, and the UK Patents Act of 1977. European patent laws include the European Patent Conventions (EPC), the European Patent Law, and the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA).
Similar patent laws have been passed in Asian countries such as Japan and Korea, and special patent and IP laws have been drafted to cover computer hardware and software patents, including the EU Directive on the patentability of computer implemented inventions.
Written by IP Patent News
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