Intellectual property

rights
Patents

RAJASREE NEOGI

JISU/2025/0651
BSC
BIOTECHNOLOGY
1 st
SEMESTER
 Introduction

A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to
exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time
in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries,
patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue
someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights.

The procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the
extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national
laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a patent application must
include one or more claims that define the scope of protection that is being sought. A
patent may include many claims, each of which defines a specific property right.

Under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) TRIPS Agreement, patents should be
available in WTO member states for any invention, in all fields of technology,
provided they are new, involve an inventive step, and are capable of industrial
application. Nevertheless, there are variations on what is patentable subject
matter from country to country, also among WTO member states. TRIPS also
provide that the term of protection available should be a minimum of twenty
years. Some countries have other patent-like forms of intellectual property, such
as utility models, which have a shorter monopoly period.
The word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means "to lay open" (i.e., to
make available for public inspection). It is a shortened version of the term letters
patent, which was an open document or instrument issued by a monarch or
government granting exclusive rights to a person, predating the modern patent
system. Similar grants included land patents, which were land grants by early state
governments in the US, and printing patents, a precursor of modern copyright.

In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who
invents something new, useful and non-obvious. A patent is often referred to as a
form of intellectual property right, an expression which is also used to refer
to trademarks and copyrights, and which has proponents and detractors
Some other types of intellectual property rights are also called patents in some
jurisdictions: industrial design rights are called design patents in the US, plant
breeders' rights are sometimes called plant patents, and utility
models and Gebrauchsmuster are sometimes called petty patents or innovation
patents. The additional qualification utility patent is sometimes used (primarily in the
US) to distinguish the primary meaning from these other types of patents.

Particular types of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method
patents, chemical patents and software patents.
 History
Although there is evidence that some form of patent rights was recognized in Ancient
Greece in the city of Sybaris, the first statutory patent system is generally regarded
to be the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474. However, recent historical research has
suggested that the 1474 Statute was inspired by laws in the Kingdom of
Jerusalem that granted monopolies to developers of novel silk-making techniques.
Patents were systematically granted in Venice as of 1474, where they issued
a decree by which new and inventive devices had to be communicated to
the Republic in order to obtain legal protection against potential infringers. The
period of protection was 10 years. As Venetians emigrated, they sought similar
patent protection in their new homes. This led to the diffusion of patent systems to
other countries.

The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first
modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate
invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial
Revolution could emerge and flourish.[14] By the 16th century, the
English Crown would habitually abuse the granting of letters patent
for monopolies. After public outcry, King James I of England (VI of Scotland) was
forced to revoke all existing monopolies and declare that they were only to be used
for "projects of new invention". This was incorporated into the Statute of
Monopolies (1624) in which Parliament restricted the Crown's power explicitly so that
the King could only issue letters patent to the inventors or introducers of original
inventions for a fixed number of years. The Statute became the foundation for later
developments in patent law in England and elsewhere. Important developments in
patent law emerged during the 18th century through a slow process of judicial
interpretation of the law. During the reign of Queen Anne, patent applications were
required to supply a complete specification of the principles of operation of the
invention for public access. Legal battles around the 1796 patent taken out by James
Watt for his steam engine, established the principles that patents could be issued for
improvements of an already existing machine and that ideas or principles without
specific practical application could also legally be patented.

The English legal system became the foundation for patent law in countries with
a common law heritage, including the United States, New Zealand and Australia. In
the Thirteen Colonies, inventors could obtain patents through petition to a given
colony's legislature. In 1641, Samuel Winslow was granted the first patent in North
America by the Massachusetts General Court for a new process for making salt

The modern French patent system was created during the Revolution in 1791.
Patents were granted without examination since inventor's right was considered as a
natural one. Patent costs were very high (from 500 to 1,500 francs). Importation
patents protected new devices coming from foreign countries. The patent law was
revised in 1844 – patent cost was lowered and importation patents were abolished.

The first Patent Act of the U.S. Congress was passed on April 10, 1790, titled "An
Act to promote the progress of useful Arts".] The first patent under the Act was
granted on July 31, 1790, to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a method of
producing potash (potassium carbonate). A revised patent law was passed in 1793,
and in 1836 a major revision was passed. The 1836 law instituted a significantly
more rigorous application process, including the establishment of an examination
system. Between 1790 and 1836 about ten thousand patents were granted. By
the American Civil War about 80,000 patents had been granted.

Gender gap in patent

The first patent in England known to be granted to a woman was to Mrs. Amye
Everard Ball in 1637 for a tincture of saffron.

In the US, married women were historically precluded from obtaining patents. While
section 1 of the Patent Act of 1790 did refer to "she", married women were unable to
own property in their own name and were also prohibited from rights to their own
income, including income from anything they invented. This historical gender gap
has lessened over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries; however, disparity is
still prevalent. In the UK, for example, only 8% of inventors were female as of 2015.
This can partly be attributed to historical barriers for women to obtain patents, as well
as to the fact that women are underrepresented in traditionally "patent-intensive"
sectors, particularly STEM sectors. Marcowitz-Bitton et al. argue that the gender
gap in patents is also a result of internal bias within the patent system.
 Innovation decline

The number of patent applications filed each year has been growing for most
countries although not smoothly, and jumps in activity are often observed due to
changes in local laws. The high number of patent families for Spain in the 1800s is
related to the superior preservation and cataloguing of the data by Spanish Patent
and Trademark Office compared to other countries .The US was the World's leader
in terms of patent families filed between 1900 and 1966, when Japan took over.
Since 2007 PR China leads.

However, in most technologically advanced countries, the total number of patent

families filed there has been declining in absolute numbers since c. 1970s–1980s.
The decline is even more pronounced when the number of patent applications is
normalized by the country's population each year, or when the country of origin
rather than country of filing is used. For the US, the population-normalized peak in
patenting occurred in 1915,[37] and the number of subsequent patents induced per
patent has been mostly declining since 1926. A study of 4,512 patents obtained
by Stanford University between 1970 and 2020 showed that the university's
patenting activity plateaued in the 2010s. Incidentally, only 20% of Stanford patents
in that dataset produced a positive net income for the university, while the rest was a
net loss.

Similar declines have been noted not only for the number of patents, but also for
other measures of innovation output.

Several hypotheses have been proposed as explanations for

the observed decline:

1. Increasing cost of doing research, as "lower-hanging fruits have been picked

up"

2. Decrease in productivity per researcher, this occurred because factor (1)

(higher hanging fruits) overwhelms increased efficiency in computation,
automation, big data analysis and communication.

3. Human civilization is reaching the limits of the human brain rather than
technological limits. "For the first time in history people are bombarded with
far more information than they can process."

4. It has also been suggested that the rate of innovation is proportional to the
rate of population growth (rather than to the total population), and that the
observed decline in research productivity is related to the resource-
limited Malthusian growth model.
5. increasing fragmentation of patent encumbrance and increasing number and
cost of patent litigations;

6. decreasing value of patents in post-industrial economies, as businesses

prefer less risky and more profitable investments in software rather than in
hardware, which can be protected more effectively and at a lower cost by
using copyrights, trade secrets, first mover advantage, download
limitations (see digital economy).[51] A related decline of manufacturing share
in the GDP of post-industrial countries has been reported in some studies.

7. A slow-down in patent applications in the US has been attributed to court

decisions in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.
(2012), Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. (2013)
and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International (2014) limiting the eligibility
of business method and biological patents.] Similar restrictions on software
patents have been enacted in other countries.

8. The number of patent applications from PR China is expected to go down

after 2025, when government subsidies for patent filing are to expire.

9. Patents that are registered but not commercialized, as is the case in around
50% of them, function as a barrier to the registration of similar ideas,
effectively creating a growing zone of non-patentability
 Law

Effects
A patent does not give a right to make or use or sell an invention. Rather, a patent
provides, from a legal standpoint, the right to exclude others from making, using,
selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the
patent, which is usually 20 years from the filing date[4] subject to the payment
of maintenance fees. From an economic and practical standpoint however, a patent
is better and perhaps more precisely regarded as conferring upon its proprietor "a
right to try to exclude by asserting the patent in court", for many granted patents turn
out to be invalid once their proprietors attempt to assert them in court. A patent is a
limited property right the government gives inventors in exchange for their
agreement to share details of their inventions with the public. Like any other property
right, it may be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned or transferred, given away, or
simply abandoned.

A patent, being an exclusionary right, does not necessarily give the patent owner the
right to exploit the invention subject to the patent. For example, many inventions are
improvements of prior inventions that may still be covered by someone else's patent.
If an inventor obtains a patent on improvements to an existing invention which is still
under patent, they can only legally use the improved invention if the patent holder of
the original invention gives permission, which they may refuse.

Some countries have "working provisions" that require the invention be exploited in
the jurisdiction it covers. Consequences of not working an invention vary from one
country to another, ranging from revocation of the patent rights to the awarding of
a compulsory license awarded by the courts to a party wishing to exploit a patented
invention. The patentee has the opportunity to challenge the revocation or license,
but is usually required to provide evidence that the reasonable requirements of the
public have been met by the working of invention.
Challenges
In most jurisdictions, there are ways for third parties to challenge the validity of an
allowed or issued patent at the national patent office; these are called opposition
proceedings. It is also possible to challenge the validity of a patent in court. In either
case, the challenging party tries to prove that the patent should never have been
granted. There are several grounds for challenges: the claimed subject matter is
not patentable subject matter at all; the claimed subject matter was actually not new,
or was obvious to the person skilled in the art, at the time the application was filed; or
that some kind of fraud was committed during prosecution with regard to listing of
inventors, representations about when discoveries were made, etc. Patents can be
found to be invalid in whole or in part for any of these reasons.
Infringement

Patent infringement occurs when a third party, without authorization from the
patentee, makes, uses, or sells a patented invention. Patents, however, are enforced
on a national basis. The making of an item in China, for example, that would infringe
a US patent, would not constitute infringement under US patent law unless the item
were imported into the US.

Infringement includes literal infringement of a patent, meaning they are performing a

prohibited act that is protected against by the patent. There is also the Doctrine of
Equivalents. This doctrine protects from someone creating a product that is basically,
by all rights, the same product that is protected with just a few modifications. [61] In
some countries, like the United States, there is liability for another two forms of
infringement. One is contributory infringement, which is participating in another's
infringement. This could be a company helping another company to create a
patented product or selling the patented product which is created by another
company. There is also inducement to infringement, which is when a party induces
or assists another party in violating a patent. An example of this would be a company
paying another party to create a patented product in order to reduce their
competitor's market share. This is important when it comes to grey market goods,
which is when a patent owner sells a product in country A, wherein they have the
product patented, then another party buys and sells it, without the owner's
permission, in country B, wherein the owner also has a patent for the product. With
either national or regional exhaustion being the law the in country B, the owner may
still be able to enforce their patent rights; however, if country B has a policy of
international exhaustion, then the patent owner will have no legal grounds for
enforcing the patent in country B as it was already sold in a different country.
Enforcement
Patents can generally only be enforced through civil lawsuits (for example, for a US
patent, by an action for patent infringement in a United States federal district court),
although some countries (such as France and Austria) have criminal penalties
for wanton infringement. Typically, the patent owner seeks monetary compensation
(damages) for past infringement, and seeks an injunction that prohibits the defendant
from engaging in future acts of infringement, or seeks either damages or injunction.
To prove infringement, the patent owner must establish that the accused infringer
practises all the requirements of at least one of the claims of the patent. (In many
jurisdictions the scope of the patent may not be limited to what is literally stated in
the claims, for example due to the doctrine of equivalents.)

An accused infringer has the right to challenge the validity of the patent allegedly
being infringed in a counterclaim. A patent can be found invalid on grounds
described in the relevant patent laws, which vary between countries. Often, the
grounds are a subset of requirements for patentability in the relevant country.
Although an infringer is generally free to rely on any available ground of invalidity
(such as a prior publication, for example), some countries have sanctions to prevent
the same validity questions being relit gated. An example is the UK Certificate of
contested validity.

Patent licensing agreements are contracts in which the patent owner (the licensor)
agrees to grant the licensee the right to make, use, sell, or import the claimed
invention, usually in return for a royalty or other compensation. It is common for
companies engaged in complex technical fields to enter into multiple license
agreements associated with the production of a single product. Moreover, it is
equally common for competitors in such fields to license patents to each other
under cross-licensing agreements in order to share the benefits of using each other's
patented inventions. Freedom Licenses like the Apache 2.0 License are a hybrid of
copyright/trademark/patent license/contract due to the bundling nature of the three
intellectual properties in one central license. This can make it difficult to enforce
because patent licenses cannot be granted this way under copyright and would have
to be considered a contract.
Ownership
In most countries, both natural persons and corporate entities may apply for a
patent. In the United States, however, only the inventor(s) may apply for a patent,
although it may be assigned to a corporate entity subsequently and inventors may be
required to assign inventions to their employers under an employment contract. In
most European countries, ownership of an invention may pass from the inventor to
their employer by rule of law if the invention was made in the course of the inventor's
normal or specifically assigned employment duties, where an invention might
reasonably be expected to result from carrying out those duties, or if the inventor had
a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's company. Applications
by artificial intelligence systems, such as DABUS, have been rejected in the US, the
UK, and at the European Patent Office on the grounds they are not natural persons.

The inventors, their successors or their assignees become the proprietors of the
patent when and if it is granted. If a patent is granted to more than one proprietor,
the laws of the country in question and any agreement between the proprietors may
affect the extent to which each proprietor can exploit the patent. For example, in
some countries, each proprietor may freely license or assign their rights in the patent
to another person while the law in other countries prohibits such actions without the
permission of the other proprietor(s).

The ability to assign ownership rights increases the liquidity of a patent as property.
Inventors can obtain patents and then sell them to third parties. The third parties
then own the patents and have the same rights to prevent others from exploiting the
claimed inventions, as if they had originally made the inventions themselves.
Governing laws
The grant and enforcement of patents are governed by national laws, and also by
international treaties, where those treaties have been given effect in national laws.
Patents are granted by national or regional patent offices, i.e. national or regional
administrative authorities. A given patent is therefore only useful for protecting an
invention in the country in which that patent is granted. In other words, patent law is
territorial in nature. When a patent application is published, the invention disclosed in
the application becomes prior art and enters the public domain (if not protected by
other patents) in countries where a patent applicant does not seek protection, the
application thus generally becoming prior art against anyone (including the applicant)
who might seek patent protection for the invention in those countries.

Commonly, a nation or a group of nations forms a patent office with responsibility for
operating that nation's patent system, within the relevant patent laws. The patent
office generally has responsibility for the grant of patents, with infringement being the
remit of national courts.

The authority for patent statutes in different countries varies. In the UK, substantive
patent law is contained in the Patents Act 1977 as amended. In the United States,
the Constitution empowers Congress to make laws to "promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts ...” The laws Congress passed are codified in Title 35 of the
United States Code and created the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

There is a trend towards global harmonization of patent laws, with the World Trade
Organization (WTO) being particularly active in this area. The TRIPS Agreement has
been largely successful in providing a forum for nations to agree on an aligned set of
patent laws. Conformity with the TRIPS agreement is a requirement of admission to
the WTO and so compliance is seen by many nations as important. This has also led
to many developing nations, which may historically have developed different laws to
aid their development, enforcing patents laws in line with global practice.

Internationally, there are international treaty procedures, such as the procedures

under the European Patent Convention (EPC) [constituting the European Patent
Organisation (EPOrg)], that centralize some portion of the filing and examination
procedure. Similar arrangements exist among the member states
of ARIPO and OAPI, the analogous treaties among African countries, and the
nine CIS member states that have formed the Eurasian Patent Organization. A key
international convention relating to patents is the Paris Convention for the Protection
of Industrial Property, initially signed in 1883. The Paris Convention sets out a range
of basic rules relating to patents, and although the convention does not have direct
legal effect in all national jurisdictions, the principles of the convention are
incorporated into all notable current patent systems. The Paris Convention set a
minimum patent protection of 20 years, but the most significant aspect of the
convention is the provision of the right to claim priority: filing an application in any
one member state of the Paris Convention preserves the right for one year to file in
any other member state, and receive the benefit of the original filing date. Another
key treaty is the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), administered by the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and covering more than 150 countries.
The Patent Cooperation Treaty provides a unified procedure for filing patent
applications to protect inventions in each of its contracting states along with giving
owners a 30-month priority for applications as opposed to the standard 12 the Paris
Convention granted. A patent application filed under the PCT is called an
international application, or PCT application. The steps for PCT applications are as
follows:

1. Filing the PCT patent application

2. Examination during the international phase

3. Examination during the national phase. Alongside these international agreements

for patents there was the Patent Law Treaty (PLT). This treaty standardized the filing
date requirements, standardized the application and forms, allows for electronic
communication and filing, and avoids unintentional loss of rights, and simplifies
patent office procedures.

Sometimes, nations grant others, other than the patent owner, permissions to create
a patented product based on different situations that align with public policy or public
interest. These may include compulsory licenses, scientific research, and in transit in
country

Anti-bio piracy dispositions

After two decades of drafting, the WIPO's Intergovernmental Committee on
Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and
Folklore moved to a Diplomatic Conference in May 2024 and adopted the WIPO
Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional
Knowledge (GRATK Treaty) mandating patent disclosure requirements for patents
based on genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge from being
granted. The Treaty contemplates revocation for patents incorrectly filed.

The treaty, and in particular it’s planned extension,] is seen as complementing

the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity and its system
of Access and Benefit-Sharing. Representatives of Indigenous peoples view the
GRATK Treaty as a "first step towards guaranteeing just and transparent access to
these resources."
Application and prosecution

Before filing for an application, which must be paid for whether a patent is granted or
not, a person will want to ensure that their material is patentable. Patentable material
must be synthetic, meaning that anything natural cannot be patented. For example,
minerals, materials, genes, facts, organisms, and biological processes cannot be
patented, but if someone were to apply an inventive, non-obvious, step to them to
synthesize something new, the result could be patentable. That includes genetically
engineered strains of bacteria, as was decided in Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
Patentability also depends on public policy and ethical standards. Additionally,
patentable materials must be novel, useful, and a non-obvious inventive step.
A patent is requested by filing a written application at the relevant patent office. The
person or company filing the application is referred to as "the applicant". The
applicant may be the inventor or its assignee. The application contains a description
of how to make and use the invention that must provide sufficient detail for a person
skilled in the art (i.e., the relevant area of technology) to make and use the invention.
In some countries there are requirements for providing specific information such as
the usefulness of the invention, the best mode of performing the invention known to
the inventor, or the technical problem or problems solved by the invention. Drawings
illustrating the invention may also be provided.

The application also includes one or more claims that define what a patent covers or
the "scope of protection".

After filing, an application is often referred to as "patent pending". While this term
does not confer legal protection, and a patent cannot be enforced until granted, it
serves to provide warning to potential infringers that if the patent is issued, they may
be liable for damages.

Once filed, a patent application is "prosecuted". A patent examiner reviews the

patent application to determine if it meets the patentability requirements of that
country. If the application does not comply, objections are communicated to the
applicant or their patent agent or attorney through an Office action, to which the
applicant may respond. The number of Office actions and responses that may occur
vary from country to country, but eventually a final rejection is sent by the patent
office, or the patent application is granted, which after the payment of additional fees,
leads to an issued, enforceable patent. In some jurisdictions, there are opportunities
for third parties to bring an opposition proceeding between grant and issuance, or
post-issuance.

Once granted the patent is subject in most countries to renewal fees to keep the
patent in force. These fees are generally payable on a yearly basis. Some countries
or regional patent offices (e.g. the European Patent Office) also require annual
renewal fees to be paid for a patent application before it is granted. In the US, patent
maintenance fees are due on 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 anniversaries of the patent
issuance. Only ca. 50% of issued US patents is maintained full term. Large
corporations tend to pay maintenance fees through the full term, while small
companies are more likely to abandon their patents earlier, even though the due fees
are ca. 5 times lower for small businesses (micro entities).

Costs
The costs of preparing and filing a patent application, prosecuting it until grant and
maintaining the patent vary from one jurisdiction to another, and may also be
dependent upon the type and complexity of the invention, and on the type of patent.

The European Patent Office estimated in 2005 that the average cost of obtaining a
European patent (via a Euro-direct application, i.e. not based on a PCT application)
and maintaining the patent for a 10-year term was around €32,000. Since
the London Agreement entered into force on May 1, 2008, this estimation is however
no longer up-to-date, since fewer translations are required.

After a patent is issued, in most countries patent maintenance payments are

required. In some countries (e.g. Russia) fees are due every year, and the amount
due does not change much. In other countries (e.g. US) payments are due ca. every
4th year after the grant date, and the amount due increases every time. A 2023
study by Rochester Institute of Technology found the full term maintenance rate of
issued US patents has been fairly constant (40-50%) since 1992. Full term patents
have more issued claims and receive on average more citations than earlier expired
patents.

The European Patent Office charges annual fees for pending applications. Also,
between 2012 and 2016 Ecuador increased its patent maintenance fees ten-fold,
briefly becoming the most expensive country to maintain patents.

In the United States, in 2000 the cost of obtaining a patent (patent prosecution) was
estimated to be from $10,000 to $30,000 per patent. When patent litigation is
involved (which in year 1999 happened in about 1,600 cases compared to 153,000
patents issued in the same year]), costs increase significantly: although 95% of
patent litigation cases are settled out of court, those that reach the courts have legal
costs on the order of a million dollars per case, not including associated business
costs. Non-national treatments in national patent offices had been prevalent among
the Northern countries until they were prohibited after the negotiation of the Paris
Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. According to Articles 2 and 3 of
this treaty, juristic and natural persons who are either national of or domiciled in a
state party to the Convention shall, as regards the protection of industrial property,
enjoy in all the other countries of the Union, the advantages that their respective
laws grant to nationals.

In addition, the TRIPS Agreement explicitly prohibits any such discrimination. TRIPS
Agreement Article 27.1 states that 'patents shall be available and patent rights
enjoyable without discrimination as to the place of invention, the field of technology
and whether products are imported or locally produced'.
Alternatives
A defensive publication is the act of publishing a detailed description of a new
invention without patenting it, so as to establish prior art and public identification as
the creator/originator of an invention, although a defensive publication can also be
anonymous. A defensive publication prevents others from later being able to patent
the invention.

A trade secret is information that is intentionally kept confidential and that provides a
competitive advantage to its possessor. Trade secrets are protected by non-
disclosure agreement and labour law, each of which prevents information leaks such
as breaches of confidentiality and industrial espionage. Compared to patents, the
advantages of trade secrets are that the value of a trade secret continues until it is
made public, whereas a patent is only in force for a specified time, after which
others may freely copy the invention; does not require payment of fees to
governmental agencies or filing paperwork; has an immediate effect; and does not
require any disclosure of information to the public. The key disadvantage of a trade
secret is its vulnerability to reverse engineering.

Benefits

Primary incentives embodied in the patent system include incentives to invent in the
first place; to disclose the invention once made; to invest the sums necessary to
experiment, produce and market the invention; and to design around and improve
upon earlier patents.

Patents provide incentives for economically efficient research and

development (R&D). A study conducted annually by the Institute for Prospective
Technological Studies (IPTS) shows that the 2,000 largest global companies
invested more than 430 billion euros in 2008 in their R&D departments. If the
investments can be considered as inputs of R&D, real products and patents are the
outputs. Based on these groups, a project named Corporate Invention Board, had
measured and analysed the patent portfolios to produce an original picture of their
technological profiles. Supporters of patents argue that without patent protection,
R&D spending would be significantly less or eliminated altogether, limiting the
possibility of technological advances or breakthroughs. Corporations would be much
more conservative about the R&D investments they made, as third parties would
be free to exploit any developments.

The logical consequence of more efficient R&D is a more efficient national economy:
An increase in patenting has proven to be linked with an increase of national income.
A 2009 study on patent effects in various countries around the world finds, for
instance, that a 10% increase in patenting in 1910 was correlated on average to a 9
to 11% higher level of per capita GDP in 1960. The positive effects of patenting on
national income were found to be particularly strong in
the U.S., Switzerland and Sweden. However, patenting is not the only factor
influencing GDP growth: among others, schooling also plays a big role.

"The patent internalizes the externality by giving the [inventor] a property right over
its invention."
In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to
facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for
the common good. Thus patenting can be viewed as contributing to open
hardware after an embargo period (usually of 20 years). If inventors did not have the
legal protection of patents, in many cases, they might prefer or tend to keep their
inventions secret (e.g. keep trade secrets). Awarding patents generally makes the
details of new technology publicly available, for exploitation by anyone after the
patent expires, or for further improvement by other inventors. Furthermore, when
a patent's term has expired, the public record ensures that the patentee's invention is
not lost to humanity.

One effect of modern patent usage is that a small-time inventor, who can afford both
the patenting process and the defence of the patent, can use the exclusive right
status to become a licensor. This allows the inventor to accumulate capital from
licensing the invention and may allow innovation to occur because he or she may
choose not to manage a manufacturing build-up for the invention. Thus the inventor's
time and energy can be spent on pure innovation, allowing others to concentrate on
manufacturability.

Another effect of modern patent usage is the social benefit(s) of technology

disclosure. Although patentees usually end up not reaping benefit from their patent
monopoly, the society still benefits from patent disclosures. Also patents both enable
and incentivize competitors to design around (or to "invent around" according to R S
Praveen Raj) the patented invention. This may promote healthy competition among
manufacturers, resulting in gradual improvements of the technology base.
Anti-patent initiatives
 Patents on expensive medications are often used as examples that can highlight
the inadequacy of patent-based mechanisms. One workaround solution that has
been applied by South Africa in the past is passing explained domestic law that
gives the state the right to import inexpensive generic versions without
permission and wait for international regulations and incentive-systems to get
upgraded at a later point.
 In 2020, multiple initiatives, including by India and South Africa, called for a
waiver of TRIPS vaccine patents for accelerated deployment of COVID-19
vaccines around the world. However, no mechanisms of alternative
medical research and development incentive-systems or technical details of
proposed "sharing" after certain amounts of profit were reported and some argue
that, instead of intellectual property rights, manufacturing know-how is the main
barrier to expanding capacity.
 The Patent Busting Project is an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) initiative
challenging patents that the organization claims are illegitimate and suppress
innovation or limit online expression. The initiative launched in 2004 and involves
two phases: documenting the damage caused by these patents, and submitting
challenges to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
 Patent critic, Joseph Stieglitz has proposed Prizes as an alternative to patents in
order to further advance solutions to global problems such as AIDS.
 In 2012, Stack Exchange launched Ask Patents, a forum for crowdsourcing prior
art to invalidate patents.
 Several authors have argued for developing defensive prior art to prevent
patenting based on obviousness using lists or algorithms. For example, a
professor of law at the University Of North Carolina School Of Law, has
demonstrated a method to protect DNA research, which could apply to other
technology. Chin wrote an algorithm to generate 11 million "obvious" nucleotide
sequences to count as prior art and his algorithmic approach has already proven
effective at anticipating prior art against oligonucleotide composition claims filed
since his publication of the list and has been cited by the U.S. patent office a
number of times. More recently, Joshua Pearce developed an open-
source algorithm for identifying prior art for 3D printing materials to make such
materials obvious by patent standards. As the 3-D printing community is already
grappling with legal issues this development was hotly debated in the technical
press. Chin made the same algorithm-based obvious argument in DNA probes.
 Google and other technology companies founded the LOT Network in 2014 to
combat patent assertion entities by cross-licensing patents, thereby preventing
legal action by such entities.
 Conclusion

In summary, patents are an important tool for inventors because they provide them
with the legal protection they need to profit from their inventions. The granting of a
patent can provide several benefits, including legal protection, competitive
advantages, and potential financial gains. However, there are also potential
drawbacks and limitations to consider, such as the cost and time involved in the
patent application process, the challenges of enforcing a patent, and the impact of
patent expiration. Overall, inventors should carefully weigh the decision to obtain a
patent, considering the potential advantages and disadvantages.