What is the U.S. Patent Term? U.S. Patent Term Evaluation

Introduction

According to the relevant provisions of the current US patent law, the validity period of patents that pay patent maintenance fees on time is as follows:

• For patent applications filed after June 8, 1995, the patent is valid for 20 years, starting from the filing date of the earliest related patent application in the U.S. or international (PCT) patent.

• If a patent application was filed before June 8, 1995 and the patent was still valid on June 8, 1995, the patent validity period is 20 years from the filing date of the earliest related patent application in the U.S. patent or international (PCT) patent, or 17 years from the date of authorization, whichever is longer (except for provisional patents).

The US patent term policy was adjusted in 1995 to align US patent law with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreed upon by the World Trade Organization in the Uruguay Round. This adjustment also made submarine patents no longer viable because patent terms are now determined by the priority date rather than the grant date.

The validity period of a design patent is shorter than that of an invention patent. For a design patent filed after May 13, 2015, the validity period is 15 years from the date of authorization; for a design patent filed before May 13, 2015, the validity period is 14 years from the date of authorization.

Patent Type

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues the following three types of patents: invention patents, new design patents, and plant patents.

Invention Patent

Utility Patent: Utility patent is the most common and can bring the most benefits to the inventor. Only "functional" inventions can be applied for invention patents. Inventions that can be applied for include: process, machine, article of manufacture, composition of matter, among which the process can be a method or a new use of the above invention. The United States excludes nuclear materials and atomic energy used for weapons from the scope of protection of patent law. The scope of protection of invention patents is defined by the claims in the patent. As long as the competitor's product is within the scope of protection defined by the claims, even if the product is not exactly the same as the invention described in the patent content (the embodiment of the invention), it may still constitute infringement.

Design

Design patent: A design must be applied for in appearance. The scope of protection of a new design patent is mainly limited to the appearance of the object depicted in the patent. Since it is easy for opponents to circumvent the new design patent by changing the design, the scope of protection of the design patent is narrower than that of the invention patent.

Plant Patents

Plant patents (patent for plant): As a major agricultural country, the United States attaches great importance to inventions in the field of plants. It not only lists plant patents separately, but also makes many regulations specifically suitable for plant inventions in terms of application and protection. Article 25 of the Chinese Patent Law lists new plant varieties as those that cannot be protected by patents, but plant varieties are not excluded in the plant patents of the United States. The inventions and creations for applying for plant patents must be plants that have been cultivated through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction and are novel and special. A single plant can only have one patent.

The United States does not protect utility model patents, but this is not unique to the United States, as there are many patent offices in the world that do not protect utility models.

References