Seniority
The term seniority stands in the context of the right of priority and describes the materially effective date of the first filing of the contents of the property right with a competent office for a specific property right (or its application). The term refers to an absolute date and can be understood as an abbreviation for "filing date or, if a priority is effectively claimed for the application, its priority date".
Explanation
It is often necessary, or at least practical, to be able to briefly address the legally relevant age reference date of a property right or its application despite various possible variants, for example when it comes to the relationship of the patent or application to other patent (applications) or to determine other publications. There are two options for this due date:
- The registration in question is itself the first deposit of certain content. Your seniority is then your filing date . Example: A German company files an invention for the first time with the German Patent and Trademark Office on January 3, 2018.
- The registration in question is not the first deposit of certain content, but is a subsequent registration of previously registered content, whereby the subsequent registration effectively claims the priority of the earlier registration. Your priority is then not your own filing date (ie not the filing date of the subsequent filing), but the filing date of the earlier filing. Example: The above German company applies for a patent on January 2, 2019 with the European Patent Office for the same invention as it did a year earlier. In this European patent application, the priority of the first German application of January 3, 2018 is claimed. The priority of the European subsequent application from January 2, 2019 is then the filing date of the earlier German patent application, i.e. January 3, 2018.
If in generally valid texts, for example in legal texts, the age reference date of an industrial property right is used, the term "seniority" is often used to record the above options. Examples of this are Section 3 Paragraphs 1 and 2 and Section 24 of the Patent Act and Section 6 and Section 9 Paragraph 1 of the Trademark Act .
Patent law
For the right of priority in intergovernmental relationships, the Paris Convention (" Paris Convention") is decisive. Practically all major countries in the world are signatory states to the Paris Convention. For technical property rights, it grants a period of one year within which the applicant for an initial application can claim the filing date of the initial application for a subsequent application in another country. In the case of patent applications claiming priority, their priority is therefore up to a year before their own filing date.
National patent laws also allow priority claims within the country, e.g. B. Germany with the so-called "internal priority" according to § 40 PatG. Here, too, the deadline is one year, so that even for applications that claim internal priority, their priority can be up to a year before their own filing date, depending on the actual data.
Trademark law
Qualitatively, the same applies to trademarks as to patents above, but with the quantitative requirement that the priority periods are usually only six months. Therefore, in the case of a trademark application claiming priority, its seniority can be up to six months before its own filing date, depending on the actual dates.