Everything about Unity Of Invention totally explained
In most
patent laws,
unity of invention is a formal administrative requirement that must be met by a
patent application in order to proceed to grant. Basically a patent application can relate only to one
invention or a group of closely related inventions. The purpose of this provision is administrative, and in particular financial, for example it serves to limit the possibility to file one patent application for several inventions while paying only one set of fees (filing fee, search fee, examination fee, renewal fees and so on). Unity of invention also makes the classification of patent documents easier.
When a patent application is objected to on the ground of a lack of unity, patent protection isn't ruled out, as it would be the case if the invention was found to be lacking novelty. A
divisional application can usually be filed for the second invention, and for the further inventions if any. Alternatively, a patent prosecutor may make a technical argument that there's unity of invention to overcome the objection.
Jurisdictions
European Patent Convention
Under
European patent practice and
case law, lack of unity (of invention) can appear either "
a priori", for example before taking into account the
prior art, or "
a posteriori", for example after having taken into account the prior art. An
a posteriori lack of unity usually results from a lack of
novelty or
inventive step of the subject-matter of one independent
claim.
United States
In
U.S. patent law, applications that claim more than one distinct invention may be subject to restriction to a single invention with the right to prosecute the remaining invention(s) being preserved through the right to file a divisional application(s). A "restriction requirement" will typically present the different inventions based on the claims within the application and the applicant may elect which invention to prosecute.
Further Information
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