Patents and Patent Policy

An inevitable consequence of the growth of the “knowledge” or “information” economy is the increased importance of instruments designed to protect the property rights associated with these intangibles. Chief among the formal means of such protection is the patent, defined as the legal right of an inventor to exclude others from making or using a particular invention. This right is customarily limited in time, to 20 years from the date of application submission in most countries. The principle behind the modern patent is that an inventor is allowed a limited amount of time to exclude others from supplying or using an invention in order to encourage inventive activity by preventing immediate imitation. In return, the inventor is required to make the description and implementation of the invention public rather than keeping it secret, allowing others to build more easily on the knowledge contained in his invention.