From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

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Who can obtain patent rights?

Who can obtain patent rights?

From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

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Who can obtain patent rights?

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- Who can obtain patent rights? There's been a lot of talk about the America Invents Act. That's a law that came out a while back that changed the rules on patent rights in the U.S. Up until recently, the first to invent in the United States was entitled to the right to a patent. Now, the first to file is entitled to the rights. This is a pretty big shift. What it means is that if you're an inventor and you're keeping track of your invention and keeping it secret, and you were going to wait until you're at the certain point to file a patent, you could do that. You could wait years in some cases and still have priority of invention. You could keep an invention secret and many years later file a patent and claim priority, or as it turns out, you could even sue someone who filed the patent, and then show that you had created that technology years earlier. The idea was that the most fair and equitable way to protect innovation was to grant rights to the first to have an idea, not the…

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