The copyright status of the content of patent applications and patents may vary from one legal system to another. Whether

scientific literature : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scie ...

can be freely copied for the purpose of

patent prosecution Patent prosecution describes the interaction between applicants and their representatives, and a patent office with regard to a patent, or an application for a patent. Broadly, patent prosecution can be split into pre-grant prosecution, which i ...

is also a matter for discussion.

Copyright status of the content of patent applications and patents

Germany

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, published patents can be freely copied so long as they are correctly cited, and the copies do not alter the patent contents.

Switzerland

Swiss copyright law expressly exempts patent documents from copyright protection.

United Kingdom

Prior to 1 August 1989, the contents of patents filed in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

were protected under crown copyright; however, the government declared in 1969 that it did not intend to enforce its copyright under "normal circumstances". Copyright on patents filed since that date lies with the applicants. There is an exemption allowing patent contents to be reproduced for the purpose of "disseminating information", but other uses are prohibited without a license from the copyright holder.

United States

The website of the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...

states that "the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions," and similar views have been published by patent attorneys. As one unpublished academic working paper on the topic of copyright application to patents notes, however, there is no law exempting U.S. patents from copyright, but there is also almost no published literature or case law on the topic. According to the

Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices The ''Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices'' is a manual produced by the United States Copyright Office, intended for use primarily by the Copyright Office staff as a general guide to policies and procedures such as registration, deposit ...

, the

U.S. Copyright Office The United States Copyright Office (USCO), a part of the Library of Congress, is a United States government body that maintains records of copyright registration, including a copyright catalog. It is used by copyright title searchers who are ...

may register a claim to copyright in a patent or a patent application, provided that the work contains a sufficient amount of original authorship. (The copyrighted work might consist of the written description for an invention or the drawings or photographs contained in the patent.) Likewise, the Office may register a claim to copyright in articles, publications, or other non-patent literature that may be submitted with a patent application. However, as with any other copyrighted work, the copyright in a patent, a patent application, or non-patent literature does not extend to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery" that may be disclosed in these works. 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). A patent applicant may include a

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

notice or

mask work Layout designs (topographies) of integrated circuits are a field in the protection of intellectual property. In United States intellectual property law, a "mask work" is a two or three-dimensional layout or topography of an integrated circuit ...

notice, but only if it also includes the following authorization, expressly permitting the reproduction of the patent: :''A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to (copyright or mask work) protection. The (copyright or mask work) owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all (copyright or mask work) rights whatsoever.'' Notably, the copyright notice itself is optional, and there is no requirement that the authorization be included in the absence of such a notice.

Copyright law and the use of non-patent literature in patent prosecution

United States

A related, but different, issue is whether copyrighted scientific literature, sometimes referred to as "non-patent literature" (NPL), can be freely copied for submission to the USPTO and more generally in the context of patent prosecution. The official position of the USPTO is that providing copies of non-patent literature to the USPTO for the purposes of patent prosecution is protected

fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...

provided that the applicant obtained the copies properly. In 2012, two lawsuits were brought challenging this practice. Both lawsuits were dismissed based on findings that submitting articles to USPTO and making limited copies of them for those purposes was a fair use..

References

External links

(USPTO) web site
''Copyright and Trademark Issues RE: Materials from USPTO Website''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Copyright On The Content Of Patents Copyright law Patent law