YesMyPatent announced it in its last newsletter,
2020 will bring its share of changes in Industrial Property.
Inventive step, or why you should apply for a patent before May 2020
The long-awaited Pacte Act is set to revolutionize patent procedures, with the main change for applicants in France being the introduction of the inventive step criterion. In addition to determining whether the invention is new, the new criterion also requires verification of whether it was obvious: “whether the person skilled in the art”, i.e. someone with knowledge of the state of the art in the field, would have been capable of making the invention in an obvious manner.
This inventive step is designed to prevent a minor modification or improvement to an invention from enabling a competitor to obtain a patent all the same, and thus benefit greatly from heavy R&D investments made by a third party. Inventive step is therefore a qualitative criterion that will enhance the value of the French patent, which will be able to stand up to the European and American patents that already have this criterion in place. Of course, these changes will go hand in hand with a restructuring of theINPI, the recruitment of examiners and, most likely, an upward revision of the filing and search fee, which today stands at €273 for small entities with fewer than 1,000 employees and for private individuals. Of course, professionals like YesMyPatent are expecting the new inventive step criterion to make it harder to obtain patents filed from May 2020 onwards…
The modernized utility certificate
We mentioned it in our February 13, 2019 blog post, the decree relating to the new version of the utility certificate will come into force on July 1, 2020.
The utility certificate is extended from 6 to 10 years’ protection from the date of filing, and it will now be possible to convert a utility certificate into a French patent application.
It will still be possible to convert your patent application into a utility certificate, a useful option if you have any doubts about the inventive step of your patent application, and to obtain the issue of a utility certificate in spite of everything, albeit for 10 years, which is still a reasonable length of time depending on the type of invention, for example, with rapid obsolescence.
French patent opposition procedure
On February 13, 2019, we wrote a blog post about changes to the opposition procedure for French patents issued by INPI :
In the Pacte Act, it was proposed that this procedure should be introduced with a view to European harmonization, since its advantage is that it enables the validity of a patent to be clarified within a reasonable timeframe and at a lower cost, compared with a legal action for invalidity before a court.
The Loi Pacte will revolutionize French Industrial Property in 2020, and YesMyPatent has already set up and trained its network of collaborators for these changes.
