Résumé
A patent examiner (or, historically, a patent clerk) is an employee, usually a civil servant with a scientific or engineering background, working at a patent office. Major employers of patent examiners are the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), and other patent offices around the world. Patent examiners review patent applications to determine whether the invention(s) claimed in each of them should be granted a patent or whether the application should instead be refused. One of the most important tasks of a patent examiner is to review the disclosure in the application and to compare it to the prior art. This involves reading and understanding a patent application, searching the prior art (including prior patent applications and patents, scientific literature databases, etc.) to determine what contribution the invention makes over the prior art, and issuing office actions to explain to the applicants and their representatives (i.e., patent attorneys or agents) any objections that may exist against the grant of a patent. In other words, an examiner reviews a patent application substantively to determine whether it complies with the legal requirements for granting of a patent. A claimed invention must meet patentability requirements of novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness, industrial application (or utility) and sufficiency of disclosure. Examiners are expected to be efficient in their work and to determine patentability within a limited amount of time. Some patent applications are easy for an examiner to assess, but others require considerably more time. This has given rise to controversy: On April 13, 2007, a "Coalition of Patent Examiner Representatives" expressed concern that in many patent offices, the pressures on examiners to produce and methods of allocating work have reduced the capacity of examiners to provide the quality of examination the peoples of the world deserve [and that] the combined pressures of higher productivity demands, increasingly complex patent applications and an ever-expanding body of relevant patent and non-patent literature have reached such a level that, unless serious measures are taken, meaningful protection of intellectual property throughout the world may, itself, become history.
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Proximité ontologique
Concepts associés (14)
Patentability
Within the context of a national or multilateral body of law, an invention is patentable if it meets the relevant legal conditions to be granted a patent. By extension, patentability also refers to the substantive conditions that must be met for a patent to be held valid. The patent laws usually require that, for an invention to be patentable, it must be: Patentable subject matter, i.e., a kind of subject-matter eligible for patent protection Novel (i.e.
Conseil en propriété industrielle
En France, la profession de Conseil en propriété industrielle (CPI) est une profession règlementée par le livre IV du Code de la propriété intellectuelle, qui possède la capacité de représenter ses clients auprès de l'INPI en vue du dépôt et du suivi des droits de propriété industrielle et droits annexes, ainsi que la capacité de produire des consultations juridiques et des actes sous sein privé dans ce domaine. Les droits de propriété industrielle principaux sont les brevets d'invention et les marques de produits ou de services.
Patent claim
In a patent or patent application, the claims define in technical terms the extent, i.e. the scope, of the protection conferred by a patent, or the protection sought in a patent application. In other words, the purpose of the claims is to define which subject-matter is protected by the patent (or sought to be protected by the patent application). This is termed as the "notice function" of a patent claim—to warn others of what they must not do if they are to avoid infringement liability.
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