Patent is a document issued by a national government granting an inventor exclusive rights to an invention for a limited time. A patent gives an inventor, or any other owner of the patent, the right to prevent others from making, selling, importing, or using the invention in the country that granted the patent. In the United States, patents are administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be new, useful, original, and not easily discovered or created. United States patent laws consider inventions to include machines, methods, manufactured products, and compositions, plus new uses of inventions in each of these categories. Patents for these inventions and new uses are called utility patents. Utility patents may also be obtained for improvements of inventions and for most new varieties of plant life. Utility patents have also been granted for forms of life created in a laboratory by genetic engineering. These life forms have included certain types of corn and mice as well as many kinds of microorganisms. Another type of patent, called a plant patent, is available for nonpollinating plants. A third kind of patent, known as a design patent, covers only the appearance of an article.
An invention that would be obvious to anyone of ordinary skill in a given field cannot be patented. Such an invention might involve merely a substitution of materials, a change in the size of a machine, or a combination of known concepts without new and unexpected results.
