Industrial Property Law

1) Unpatentable invention
The subject matter of a patent application must be a patentable invention, and the subject matter must qualify as an invention. Accordingly, the Institute will reject any patent application whose subject matter is an unpatentable invention, pursuant to Articles L. 611-16 to L. 611-19 of the Intellectual Property Code (Article L. 612-12, 4° IP Code), even if the unpatentab …

Control of the conditions of patentability

The subject matter of a patent application must be a patentable invention, and the subject matter must qualify as an invention. Accordingly, the Institute will reject any patent application whose subject matter is an unpatentable invention, pursuant to Articles L. 611-16 to L. 611-19 of the Intellectual Property Code (Article L. 612-12, 4° IP Code), even if the unpatentability is not obvious . These provisions concern inventions excluded from patentability for ethical and public health reasons, i.e. inventions:

- which concern methods of surgical or therapeutic treatment of the human or animal body, and diagnostic methods applied to the human or animal body (Article L. 611-16 IP Code);

- the commercial exploitation of which is contrary to human dignity, public order or morality (Article L. 611-17 IP Code);

- which concern the human body (Article L. 611-18 IP Code) or animal breeds, plant varieties, biological processes for obtaining plants or animals and processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals (Article L. 611-19 IP Code).

The application is also rejected if its subject matter cannot be considered an invention within the meaning of Article L. 611-10, 2 of the Intellectual Property Code (Article L. 612-12, 5° IP Code). The text refers to applications for discoveries excluded from patentability as such, such as scientific theories, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, software  or presentations of information.

When examining a patent application, the INPI checks that the invention in question meets the cumulative conditions for patentability set out in Article L. 611-10, 1 of the Intellectual Property Code (Article L. 612-12, 7° IP Code), which requires that it be new, involve an inventive step and be susceptible of industrial application. The new wording of Article L. 612-12, 7°, resulting from the Pacte Law, substantially extends the powers of the INPI, which could previously only reject an application if it found a manifest lack of novelty resulting from the search report .

3) Irregularities in the search report procedure

The INPI rejects the patent application if the applicant has not, where applicable, submitted observations or filed new claims during the search report procedure provided for in Article L. 612-14 of the Intellectual Property Code (Article L. 612-12, 9° IP Code). Where the applicant has filed several patent applications relating to the same invention, which has been the subject of a French patent application, the INPI will reject the application if the applicant fails to produce the required documents within the time-limit set, despite having been invited to do so, or fails to justify being unable to produce those documents (Article R. 612-56-1 IP Code).

Prior to Law No 2019-486 of 22 May 2019, which came into force on 22 May 2020, the text required the invention to be manifestly unpatentable. Manifest unpatentability was also required for the subject matter of the invention.

Cass. com. 28 May 1975, LawLex202200002355JBJ, according to which the INPI director general can reject a patent application which does not include in its claims either a technical process or an apparatus, but which clearly only concerns a program or a series of instructions for carrying out operations on a calculating machine.

See e.g. CA Paris, 21 May 2019, LawLex202200009845JBJ.

Industrial Property Law

281. Control of the conditions of patentability

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281. Control of the conditions of patentability

Demandez un accès gratuit au contenu exclusif Livv – juristes d’entreprise

Les décisions de justice citées dans ce paragraphe :

Les notions juridiques connexes

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au contenu exclusif Livv – juristes d’entreprise