How to Invent and Protect Your Invention: A Guide to Patents for Scientists and Engineers

CHAPTER 12

FOREIGN PATENTS

Patents are granted by individual sovereign nations. No country can control or limit the use of inventions (and innovations) outside of its borders except by international agreement. Given the fact that there are close to 200 sovereign nations, each with its own perspective on the roles and rights of inventions, there are myriad issues and complexities related to foreign patents. We wish to summarize some of these in this chapter.

Like the United States, most countries offer utility patents for inventions that are useful, novel, and unobvious, although some countries may have different terms for these requirements. Members of the European Union, for example, require that patentable inventions be new, have industrial applicability, and evidence an inventive step. (See Section 12.2 for details.)

As in the United States, foreign patents are generally available to an inventor or his assignee and last for 20 years from the date of filing the application. Some countries, such as Japan and some members of the European Union, offer a five-year extension on the patent term for pharmaceuticals. At least 75 countries, including China, Japan, and Germany, have a special type of patent, known as a utility model or mini-patent, that requires only a minor improvement over the current state of the art. This gives inventors short-term protection, generally somewhere between six and 14 years, for minor improvements upon existing technology.