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.
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👉 Patentability in the context of Utility (patent)
In United States patent law, utility is a patentability requirement. As provided by 35 U.S.C. § 101, an invention is "useful" if it provides some identifiable benefit and is capable of use and "useless" otherwise. The majority of inventions are usually not challenged as lacking utility, but the doctrine prevents the patenting of fantastic or hypothetical devices such as perpetual motion machines.
The patent examiners guidelines require that a patent application expresses a specific, credible, and substantial utility. Rejection by an examiner usually requires documentary evidence establishing a prima facie showing that there is no specific, substantial, and credible utility.
In this Dossier
Patentability in the context of Novelty (patent)
Novelty is one of the patentability requirements for a patent claim, whose purpose is to prevent issuing patents on known things, i.e. to prevent public knowledge from being taken away from the public domain.
An invention is anticipated (i.e. not new) and therefore not patentable if it was known to the public before the priority date of the patent application. Although the concept of "novelty" in patent law appears simple and self-explanatory, this view is very far from reality. Some of the most contentious questions of novelty comprise:
Patentability in the context of Inventive step and non-obviousness
The inventive step and non-obviousness reflect a general patentability requirement present in most patent laws, according to which an invention should be sufficiently inventive—i.e., non-obvious—in order to be patented. In other words, "[the] nonobviousness principle asks whether the invention is an adequate distance beyond or above the state of the art".
The expression "inventive step" is used in European Patent Convention and in Patent Cooperation Treaty, while the expression "non-obviousness" is predominantly used in United States patent law. The expression "inventiveness" is sometimes used as well. Although the basic principle is roughly the same, the assessment of the inventive step and non-obviousness varies from one country to another. For instance, the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) differs from the practice in the United Kingdom.