10 Facts About Patent rights

Patent rights is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.

In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights.

Procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements.

Some other types of intellectual property rights are called patents in some jurisdictions: industrial design rights are called design patents in the US, plant breeders' rights are sometimes called plant patents, and utility models and Gebrauchsmuster are sometimes called petty patents or innovation patents.

Patent rights, being an exclusionary right, does not necessarily give the patent owner the right to exploit the invention subject to the patent.

Patent rights infringement occurs when a third party, without authorization from the patentee, makes, uses, or sells a patented invention.

The third parties then own the patents and have the same rights to prevent others from exploiting the claimed inventions, as if they had originally made the inventions themselves.

Internationally, there are international treaty procedures, such as the procedures under the European Patent rights Convention [constituting the European Patent rights Organisation (EPOrg)], that centralize some portion of the filing and examination procedure.

Patent rights is requested by filing a written application at the relevant patent office.

European Patent Office estimated in 2005 that the average cost of obtaining a European patent and maintaining the patent for a 10-year term was around €32, 000.