Tag: Intellectual Property Appellate Board

At the heart of a patent application lies its claims. A claim is a signifier of the scope of protection that is sought under the patent. Claims are the first and most important aspect to be examined during prosecution, infringement, and litigation. Every patent application must be accompanied by at least one claim, and usually, an application contains several more. ......

Patents are granted for inventions that are novel and involve an inventive step. Any information or material that is publicly available or published before the filing of a patent application is known as “prior art” and this forms the basis on which novelty and inventive step is determined. ......

Inventions that fall within, or overlap with, disclosures in the prior art are called “selection inventions”. Generally, selection inventions involve the selection of one or more specific embodiments, such as individual elements, subsets, or sub-ranges, within a larger known set or range disclosed in the prior art. This raises critical questions around how the novelty and inventive step of selection patents should be judged. ......