Outline of patents

A patent can be described as all of the following:

• Property – one or more components (rather than attributes), whether physical or incorporeal, of a person's estate; or so belonging to, as in being owned by, a person or jointly a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation or even a society.
  • Intellectual property – intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.

• Biological patent – the scope and reach of biological patents vary among jurisdictions,[1] and may include biological technology and products, genetically modified organisms and genetic material. The applicability of patents to substances and processes wholly or partially natural in origin is a subject of debate.[1]
• Business method patent – includes patents on new types of e-commerce; and on methods of doing business in insurance, banking, tax compliance, etc. A business method may be defined as "a method of operating any aspect of an economic enterprise".[2]
  • Tax patent – discloses and claims a system or method for reducing or deferring taxes. In September 2011, President Barack Obama signed legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that effectively prohibits the granting of tax patents in general.
• Chemical patent – patent for an invention in the chemical or pharmaceuticals industry. Not a special legal form of patent.
• Design patent –
• Essential patent –
• Insurance patent –
• Medical patent –
• Software patent –
• Submarine patent –

• Patent application – request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for the invention described and claimed by that application. An application consists of a description of the invention (the patent specification), together with official forms and correspondence relating to the application.
  • Divisional patent application – type of patent application which contains matter from a previously filed application (the so-called parent application). Whilst a divisional application is filed later than the parent application, it may retain its parent's filing date, and will generally claim the same priority.
  • Patent drawing – drawing in a patent application that illustrates the invention, or some of its embodiments (which are particular implementations or methods of carrying out the invention), or the prior art. Drawings may be required by law to be in a particular form, and the requirements may vary depending on the jurisdiction.
• Patent prosecution – interaction between applicants and their representatives, and a patent office with regard to a patent, or an application for a patent. Broadly, patent prosecution can be split into pre-grant prosecution, which involves negotiation with a patent office for the grant of a patent, and post-grant prosecution, which involves issues such as post-grant amendment and opposition.
  • Public participation in patent examination – used in some forms to help identifying relevant prior art and, more generally, to help assessing whether patent applications and inventions meet the requirements of patent law, such as novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness, and sufficiency of disclosure.
• Patent term adjustment – process of extending the term of a US patent. Its intention is to accommodate for delays caused by the US patent office during the Prosecution of a US patent application. The total PTA is an addition to the 20-year lifespan of a US patent.

• History of patent law – generally considered to have started with the Venetian Statute of 1474 and the 1624 English Statute of Monopolies.[3]
  • History of United States patent law – this started even before the U.S. Constitution was adopted, with some state-specific patent laws. The history spans over more than three centuries.
    • Patent caveat – was a legal document filed with the United States Patent Office. Caveats were instituted by the U.S. Patent Act of 1836, but were discontinued in 1909, with the U.S. Congress abolishing the system formally in 1910.
• Patent model – was a scratch-built miniature model no larger than 12" by 12" by 12" (approximately 30 cm by 30 cm by 30 cm) that showed how an invention works. It was one of the most interesting early features of the United States patent system.
• 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire – second of several disastrous fires in the history of the U.S. Patent Office. Its cause was ultimately determined to be accidental. Many patent documents and models from the preceding three decades were irretrievably lost. As a result of the fire, Congress and the newly legally revamped Patent Office changed the way it handled its recordkeeping, assigning numbers to patents and requiring multiple copies of supporting documentation.
  • X-Patents – all the patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office from July 1790 (when the first U.S. patent was issued), to July 1836. The actual number is unknown, but the best estimate is 9,957. The records were burned in a fire, in December 1836, while in temporary storage. No copies or rosters were maintained by the government at the time, leaving only the inventors’ copies to reconstruct the collection.
• Confederate Patent Office – agency of the Confederate States of America charged with issuing patents on inventions. is known to have issued 266 patents, and likely it issued some more during the early months of 1865. Unfortunately, the records it contained were destroyed in a fire. Very few patent documents issued by the CPO, likely fewer than 10, are known to survive.
• 1877 U.S. Patent Office fire – second of several disastrous fires in the history of the U.S. Patent Office. It occurred in the Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., on 27 September 1877. Although the building was constructed to be fireproof, many of its contents were not; some 80,000 models and some 600,000 copy drawings were destroyed. No patents were completely lost, however, and the Patent Office soon reopened.
• Wright brothers patent war – the Wrights' preoccupation with suing infringers and collecting license fees hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1910 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[4] Aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
• Smartphone patent wars – since 2009, ongoing business battle by smartphone manufacturers including Sony, Google, Apple Inc., Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Xiaomi, and HTC, among others, in patent litigation. The conflict is part of the wider "patent wars" between multinational technology and software corporations.* State Committee on Standardization, Metrology and Patents (Azerbaijan) –

• Economics and patents – Patents are an incentive system designed to encourage innovation. By conferring rights on the owner to exclude competitors from the market (and thus providing a higher probability of financial rewards in the market place), patents offer the incentive for people to study and create new technology.
• Prizes as an alternative to patents – Some authors advocating patent reform have proposed the use of prizes as an alternative to patents. Critics of the current patent system, such as Joseph E. Stiglitz, are critical of patents because they fail to provide incentives for innovations which are not commercially marketable.

• Patent cliff – phenomena of patent expiration dates and an abrupt drop in sales that follows for a group of products capturing high percentage of a market. Usually, these phenomena are noticed when they affect blockbuster products. A blockbuster product in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, is defined as a product with sales exceeding US$1 billion per year.
• Patent family – patents for a single invention in multiple countries.
  • Triadic patent – series of corresponding patents filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO), for the same invention, by the same applicant or inventor. Triadic patents form a special type of patent family.
• Patent holding company – company that holds patents on behalf of one or more other companies but does not necessarily manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents held.
• Patent portfolio – collection of patents owned by a single entity, such as an individual or corporation. The patents may be related or unrelated. Patent applications may also be regarded as included in a patent portfolio.

• Double patenting –
• Glossary of patent law terms –
• Large and small entities in patent law –
• Patentability – meeting 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.
  • Patentable subject matter –
  • Novelty –
    • Novelty under the European Patent Convention –
  • Inventive step or non-obviousness –
    • Inventive step under the European Patent Convention –
    • Non-obviousness in United States patent law –
  • Industrial applicability –
  • Utility –
  • Sufficiency of disclosure –
• Patent case law –
• Patent claim types –
• Patent infringement –
  • Enforcement of European patents –
  • Patent infringement in Canadian law –
  • Patent infringement under United Kingdom law –
  • Patent infringement under United States law –
• Patent law cases, United States –
• Software patent law
  • Software patent debate –
  • Software patents and free software –
  • Software patents under the European Patent Convention –
  • Software patents under TRIPs Agreement –
• Sufficiency of disclosure –
  • Disclosure of the invention under the European Patent Convention –
• Term of patent –
  • Term of patent in the United States –
• Unity of invention –
  • Unity of invention under the European Patent Convention –

• Backlog of unexamined patent applications –
• South African patent system –

• U.S. Patent No. 1 –
• Abraham Lincoln's patent –
• Cabilly patents – two US patents issued to Genentech and City of Hope which relate to the "fundamental technology required for the artificial synthesis of antibody molecules." The name refers to lead inventor Shmuel Cabilly, who was awarded the patent while working at City of Hope in the 1980s.
• Edison patents –
• Nikola Tesla patents –
• Hendrik Wade Bode patents –
• Reginald Tessenden patents –
• Software patents –
• Steam technology patents –
• X-patents –

• Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform –
• Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys –
• Coalition for Patent Fairness –
• Eurasian Patent Organization –
• European Patent Institute –
• European Patent Judges' Symposium –
• European Patent Lawyers Association –
• European Patent Organisation –
  • Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation – one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation, the other being the European Patent Office
• Institute of Patentees and Inventors –
• International Patent Institute –
• Japan Patent Attorneys Association –
• National Association of Patent Practitioners –
• Nordic Patent Institute –
• Patent Office Professional Association –
• Software Patent Institute –
• The United States Patent Association –
• Turkish Patent Institute –
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) –
  • World Intellectual Property Indicators – an annual report published by WIPO, providing a range of indicators covering the areas of intellectual property

• European Patent Bulletin –
• European Patent Office Reports (EPOR) –
• Mitteilungen der deutschen Patentanwälte –
• Official Journal of the European Patent Office –
• Patent Information News –
• Patent World –
• United States Patents Quarterly –

• Patent attorneys and agents –
• People associated with patent law –
• People who have headed the United States Patent Office –
• Top United States patent recipients –

• Baidu Patents –
• Espacenet –
• Google Patents – search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
• Patentscope –

• Glossary of patent law terms – presents terms used in patent law, including special types of patents and patent applications
• Outline of intellectual property

This is a list of topics related to patents.