Patent requirement
The patenting requirement is a principle of national and supranational patent laws with the following regulatory content: A patent must be granted for an invention that is the subject of a patent application if all the legal requirements are met. The officials involved in examining a patent application therefore have no discretion with regard to the criteria for examining the invention for patentability .
Legal basis
The patenting requirement is usually not explicitly referred to as such in the relevant laws. Rather, the mandatory character results from a corresponding linguistic formulation.
As an example, the essentially identical wording of the German Patent Act (PatG) and the European Patent Convention (EPC) are cited.
- Section 1 (1) of the Patent Act: Patents are granted for inventions in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are commercially applicable.
- Art. 52 (1) EPC: European patents are granted for inventions in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step and are industrially applicable.
The command character is expressed here solely through the sentence construction using "are" ... "granted".
Web links
- European Patent Convention , accessed January 31, 2016.
