Provisional Protection for Inventions.

Progress, Volume I, Issue 2, 1 December 1905, Page 28

Provisional Protection for Inventions.

By E. S. Baldwin, M.E., Queen's Prizeman, South Kensington.

Great Britain and her colonies stand alone m providing means for the provisional protection of inventions, and even Great Britain has recently curtailed the period of provisional protection from nine to six months This innovation has apparentlybeen tacitly accepted by patent agents and inventors, and we may well be surprised that such a curtailment of acquired rights should have been so accepted. Provisional protection, besides other benefits, grants protection upon a specification in which merely the nature of the invention is set out. The application is kept secret until the complete specification is filed. Thus the inventor can pursue his experiments or trials in public without fear of invalidating his rights to protection, and be protected against anticipation as effectually as if he had complete protection. He cannot, however, sue for acts of infringement committed before the acceptance and gazetting of his complete specification. Provisional protection affords the further benefit that the invention is not published abroad by the fact of filing his application. His' subsequent application for patent abroad is, therefore, not invalidated by publication of the invention by his own act. He can obtain protection at a small cost while he arranged his finances for the larger outlay to protect the invention in foreign countries. The important question almost daily arises of adding to a specification after it has been accepted. The Act allows amendment of a specification by way of correction, disclaimer or explanation. Anything which would increase the scope of the specification would not be allowed. A fresh apphcation must be made to protect the added matter, and the usual taxes must be paid on both applications. A very beneficial alteration in the law might be made by allowing an applicant to add to his specification during the period of protection, with the proviso that he could not sue for infringement of any added part upon acts committed prior to the date of filing such added part If this alteration was made in the patent law, one set of taxes'' would be payable on the whole invention. Seeing the large surplus derived from Patent Office fees, the concession suggested might well receive the attention of our legislators.

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