Outline of patents
overview of and topical guide to patents
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to patents:
Patent – set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process. Patents are a form of intellectual property.
What type of thing is a patent?
A patent can be described as all of the following:
Property – one or more components (rather than attributes), whether physical or incorporeal, of a person's estate; or so belonging to, as in being owned by, a person or jointly a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation or even a society.
Intellectual property – intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.
Types of patents
Biological patent – the scope and reach of biological patents vary among jurisdictions, and may include biological technology and products, genetically modified organisms and genetic material. The applicability of patents to substances and processes wholly or partially natural in origin is a subject of debate.
Business method patent – includes patents on new types of e-commerce; and on methods of doing business in insurance, banking, tax compliance, etc. A business method may be defined as "a method of operating any aspect of an economic enterprise".
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This entry incorporates text from “Outline of patents” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.