Unlock the Power of Digital Signature Legitimateness for Assignment of Intellectual Property in the United Kingdom

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hello my name is Dr Mark Looney Dr Looney is my real name um if you're born with a surname like mine you've got to get a PhD really it's kind of rude not to so my PhD is in Acoustics uh this gives me insight into signal processing and that kind of thing which allowed me to come and work here at the IPO as a patent examiner in telecoms uh telcoms patents uh have been in the news a lot recently uh in 2012 uh Apple were awarded a billion dollars in Damages from Samsung uh that case will be appealed over the next few years uh but it does show how financially important these kinds of decisions can be so I'm going to talk about patent a patent is a 20e monopoly granted in return for full and open disclosure uh of your invention the word patent comes from the Latin for openness um in order to reward Innovation reward re research uh and because the world would be a very different place if the only way you could uh make money from your idea was to keep it secret um so it's long been recognized that the state does need to kind of step in here and interfere and provide some kind of reward for that innovation in order to get a Pand uh your invention needs to fulfill three criteria firstly does it have an industrial application uh is it something you can actually make or approach process you can actually carry out that provides some kind of technical uh contribution uh a stroke that gets rid of all kinds of creative and autistic ideas they're more the perview of copyright um uh it gets excludes things called business methods if the only thing that your idea contribut is uh a business Advantage rather than a technical Advantage uh that's unlikely to be patentable uh and it need not just be a financial transaction in the past I've objected to uh a method of uh giving you your television program when you've watched enough adverts so it's kind of you buying the program with your time and attention uh elsewhere in the office we've had a case where um the idea was a prisoner could get a short a sentence by submitting to Corporal punishments kind of buying time with pain so these were all considered business methods uh there's vious other exclusions as well uh and this also gives us uh patent examiners a little bit of a shortcut we often get applications for things called uh perpetual motion machines okay where you get more energy out than you could possibly get via the laws of Therma Dynamics uh this allowed us to say uh your invention hasn't got an industrial application come back when you've got your Nobel Prize so the second uh criteria is novelty is it new how has it ever been done before not just has it been patented before but has it ever been done in public H if it has if it forms what we call the state-ofthe-art the prior art um we say that your invention is anticipated and you can't have that Monopoly so when we get a case wheel try and find uh the closest example of your invention uh in the prior art uh and we can look everywhere really and one of the most fruitful sources of these kinds of ations is of course uh the applicants own Publications first rule of patents is like the first rule of Fight Club you do not talk about your invention at least not with someone who hasn't specifically promised to keep it secret until you actually apply to us now this doesn't mean that we're kind of East German starzy officials uh bugging tables in restaurants and these kinds of things uh if you tell your friend in the pub uh they will almost certainly be as if uh they're under some kind of confidentiality agreement but just be aware that uh it is possible that at a later date they could tell us that you divulged your information in a public place which might stop you getting your Monopoly uh the third criteria uh not only does what you've done have to be new never been done before it also can't be obvious based on what has been done before it needs what's called called an inventive step as parent examiners what we do is we become a kind of imaginary person okay an imaginary person with no imagination no inventive capability at all uh one judge called him a Ned or a team of Neds uh and surprisingly civil servants don't have that much trouble becoming this person in the course of their day so we will ask ourselves we'll look at your invention we'll compare it to the closest thing we' found from the prior art and we'll ask would this invention be obvious to this expert who knows an awful lot about this technical subject matter but is unable to make any actual inventive step himself that's the kind of test for inventive inventive step so there's your three criteria and there's the general ethos um of the patent system thanks very much