Patent national

Patents

What inventions cannot be protected by means of a patent?

Examination / procedure

Publication of the application

Granting of the patent / publication

A patent protects your invention. It has to be novel and inventive and must not have been published at the time of application; anything that has been made publicly accessible anywhere in the world, in whatever form, constitutes the state of the art and no longer qualifies as novel.

A patent is a geographically limited exclusive right (monopoly) of limited duration. You alone may produce, sell or use the protected invention in Austria.

N.B. Register your invention, before you go public with it. “Silence is golden!”

• discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
• the human body at the various stages of its formation and development;
• the simple discovery of one of the elements of the human body, including the sequence or partial sequence of a gene;
• aesthetic creations;
• schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
• presentations of information;
• inventions that are contrary to generally recognised laws of nature (the law of conservation of energy, the principle of conservation of linear momentum, etc.) such as a perpetual motion machine.

Once you have filed the patent application for your invention, your application documents will be examined (for compliance with the formal requirements) and your invention will be examined (in substantive terms). You will receive the result of the examination in the form of a written preliminary decision, which you may respond to within a stated deadline. You have the opportunity to rectify any deficiencies or limitations of your claim within that deadline based on the state of the art identified by our search. In the event of failure to do so or to do so satisfactorily, your application will be rejected.

Eighteen months after the date of application (or, where applicable, the priority date), the application documents originally filed by you will be published together with a search report (if already available) and, where applicable, the most recent version of the claims. You enjoy provisional protection as of the date of publication, if the application ultimately results in a patent being granted.

If you would like the documents originally filed by you to be published before expiry of the 18 months, you can file an application to that effect by letter (no special form is required). Such publication, however, is subject to the documents being formally in order.

If the Patent Office has no reservations about granting a patent, the decision to grant the patent will be made and the patent will be granted when the decision comes into effect (upon expiry of a period following service of the decision on granting the patent).

Patent protection commences upon registration of the patent and its publication in the Patent Gazette. The patent specification is provided on the publication server (link under the main category “Patent Managen” (“Patent management”)) and a patent certificate is issued.