There are several ways of protecting research results, depending on their nature, notably:
- Industrial property rights: These allow the protection of inventions, distinctive signs, industrial designs and semiconductor topographies.
- Intellectual property rights: These allow the protection of literary, artistic or scientific works, audiovisual works and computer programs.
Industrial property - Patents
A patent is a right, granted by the State, which gives the patent holder the right to prevent others from making, selling or using the invention without the consent of the patent holder. For an invention to be patentable, it must meet the following requirements:
- Novelty: An invention is new if it is not covered by the state of the art, which includes all information accessible to the public before the filing date of the patent application.
- Inventive step: An invention involves an inventive step if from the state of the art it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art.
- Industrial application: An invention has industrial application if it can be manufactured or used in any type of industry.
Discoveries, scientific theories, mathematical methods, literary and scientific works, business methods and computer programs as such are not patentable. Although computer programs as such cannot be protected by patent, if they form part of a broader system, their patentability is not excluded. Thus, both in Spain and in Europe, numerous patents for computer-implemented inventions are granted every year.
Establishing whether an invention is patentable or not is a complex and time-consuming process. In addition, since the costs can exceed €40,000, there must be a sufficiently high expectation of return to justify the effort.
Preparation of the patent application
In the process of preparing the patent application, detailed technical information should be provided to assist the Valuation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship Area's technical staff in the preparation of the report for the application.
During this process, those technical characteristics of the invention that are new and inventive should be collected, as well as information on some way of carrying out the invention, so experimental data, examples, prototypes, etc., will be very useful.
Who are the inventors?
It is essential to correctly identify those persons who have developed the invention, i.e. the inventors. While in scientific publications it is common to include research staff who had some collateral collaboration, doing so in the case of a patent may lead to invalidating the patent. Therefore, it must be justified that there is a relevant intellectual contribution, and not a mere instrumental contribution, by all the staff involved in the development of the invention.
Processing a patent application
The procedure for handling a patent application includes, in most cases, the filing of a patent application at the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM). As patents are territorial rights, if the invention needs to be protected in another country or region (national or regional phase entry), patent applications must be filed in the corresponding countries/regions. Under the following international agreements, protection can be extended to other countries/regions:
- Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property: This is a convention, currently signed by 177 countries, under which 12 months are granted, from the filing date of the patent application (priority date), to file the patent application in any country of the convention with a filing date on the priority date.
- Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT): This treaty, currently signed by 153 countries, allows, by filing a single international application, to extend the deadline for national/regional phase-in to 30 months, while maintaining the priority date.
The figure below illustrates the various steps for the processing of a patent application from the filing date to the end of the patent term (20 years from the priority date).
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights, also known as copyright, apply to creations such as literary, artistic or scientific works, audiovisual works and computer programs.
Such rights arise by the mere fact of the creation of the work and do not require any form of registration. In some cases, it is possible to register the work in the Intellectual Property Register which provides proof of the creation of the work. It should be noted that copyright protects only and exclusively the specific expression of the work and not the ideas that may be behind it. Thus, in the case of a computer program, the specific expression of the computer program (source code) would be protected.
According to the laws governing intellectual property rights, the persons who created the work are considered to be the authors. Intellectual property rights last for the life of the author and up to 70 years after their death.
Valuation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship Area
- AVTE, Edificio Emprendia.
- Avenida das Ciencias, 6, 15782Santiago de Compostela
- avte [at] usc.es
Valuation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship Area
- AVTE. Edificio CACTUS Lugo
- Campus Lugo s/n, 27002Lugo
- avte [at] usc.es