A patent grants the patent holder the exclusive right to exclude others from making, using, importing, and selling the patented innovation for a limited period of time. Patents are a type of intellectual property.
Patents are known as one of the most powerful ways to protect your business idea or invention. They give you the right to stop other people from using or selling your invention for a certain period of time. The duration of this monopoly varies by country and type of patent. It is an exclusive right granted by government to an inventor or their assignee for an invention that meets the legal requirements of novelty, usefulness and industrial applicability.
The concept of patent protection dates back to ancient Greece, where laws were enacted to protect inventors who developed new and useful products or processes. Patents are intended to encourage innovation.
The five primary requirements for patentability are: (1) patentable subject matter, (2) utility, (3) novelty, (4) non-obviousness, and (5) enablement.
There are two types of patents: utility patents and design patents. A utility patent protects the functionality of a product or process while A design patent protects only the ornamental appearance of an article; it does not protect any functional features of that article. Although there are many other types of intellectual property protection available to protect inventions such as copyrights and trademarks, a utility patent is by far the strongest form of protection available to inventors.
The Nigeria law of patents is governed by the Patents and Design Acts Cap. 344 of the law of the Federation of Nigeria 1990(Act of 1970), which provides that a patent may be granted for an invention that: (a) is new; (b) involves an inventive step ("not obvious"); (c) is capable of industrial application ("useful"). It is administered by the Registrar of patent, trademark and industrial design which is under the umbrella of the Federal Ministry of Commerce, Abuja.
A patent does not automatically make a product or idea a profitable one. Currently, patents expire 20 years after they are filed. Before the patent expires, however, competitors can develop and sell their own "knock-off" products based on the same underlying principle as the patented product if they can do one of two things: (1) lawfully reverse engineer the innovation (meaning they have to access it through legal means), or (2) invent around it (meaning they come up with a different way of accomplishing the same thing).
Patents give inventors exclusive rights to their innovations, allowing them to control who uses them and for how long. But unlike copyrights or trademarks, patents provide only limited protection for an invention, no matter who created it.
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