PATENTABLE INVENTIONS BY INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS, DETERMINING THE PROTECTION COVERAGE AND TREND PATENTS
Cansu SAHINOGLU
Assistant Specialist, R&D and Intellectual Property
Article 82 titled "Patentable Treaties and Exceptions to Patentability" of the Industrial Property Law No. 6769 states which inventions can be patented and what does not.
In this article, the details of the first and second paragraphs of article 82 shall be discussed and the exceptions to the patentability requirements and patentability of our national legislation in accordance with European legislation shall be examined:
I. PATENTABLE INVENTIONS
In the first paragraph of the article, there is an introduction as "Inventions in every area of technology ..." which states that in order to be defined the patentability of an invention, it must solve a technical problem. In other words, it is expected that the resulting benefit is not a relative concept that can vary from person to person, but is measurable. For example, patenting is not possible with the argument "I designed a suspension system that provides a very comfortable ride."
In order to provide a solution to the technical problem, the expression "suspension system providing very comfortable driving" should be transformed into a "suspension system which provides damping in a wider frequency range."
As stated in the first paragraph, it is expected that your invention solving technical problem will meet the three basic criteria for patenting: Being new, including an invention step and being applicable to the industry.
“Innovation criteria” requires that the proposed solution is not published, verbal, written or in any way publicly available anywhere in the world before the patent application date. In this context, a comprehensive patent search of an experienced patent attorney's database plays an important role in determining which features of your invention are new in contrast with the previous technique.
The second criteria, “Including an invention step”, means that the technique is not that obvious to an expert in its area, i.e. exceeds the known state of the technique.
The third and the last criteria, “the industrial applicability” means that the technical data in the patent file is as detailed as the expert in the field can apply the invention. At the same time, inventions that meet all these criteria enter the protection process for 20 years by being entitled to obtain patent registration while providing a technical solution.
THE EXEMPTIONS OF PATENTABILITY
The list of exemptions for patentability, which extends with the new Industrial Property Law No. 6769, is given under five categories in the second paragraph of Article 82:
III. DETERMINING THE PROTECTION SCOPE
As anyone who works in the patent area and closely follows this area knows that the registration process after patent application is a long and difficult journey. Although the registration is a process that requires a struggle which determines the result, it can be estimated at the outset by analyzing the request structure of the file, where a patent application file can or cannot be registered.
A patent file is composed of a 'description' explaining every details of the invention, a 'claims' structure determining the protection scope of the invention, a 'summary' briefly describing what the invention is, and the images referred in the description. Describing the invention as precisely as possible in the description is crucial both to enable the evaluator of the invention to better understand and to facilitate further processes since it is possible to make a change of claim which doesn’t go beyond the description throughout the patent registration process. However, even if very detailed information about the invention is included in the description, this information cannot be effective in determining the protection scope of the file, unless it is stated in the 'claims' section. It is also necessary that all the claims are based on the description and that all the information given in the claim structure is also included in the description.
Claim structure, which defines the scope of protection of patent files and the quality of the struggle in the registration process, need to be set within a wide-range that is wide enough to prevent competitors walking around the invention by exploiting the file, but also within a narrow-range to not interfering with the limits of other patent files[ÖK(1] .
CONCLUSION
With the list of exemptions of patentability extended with the Industrial Property Law No. 6769, the limits of our patentability in our legislation, which has become compliant with European legislation, have been made even more prominent. Our country, which has achieved harmony with Europe in terms of legislation, wishes to catch up with Europe in terms of number of inventions and quality (commercialization) in the near future.
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