If you want to distinguish your goods, services or both from those of another company, you may need a trademark or trade name. Find out what they are, what their registration procedure is and what it involves.
Información sobre los plazos de presentación de solicitudes de transformación de marcas de la Unión Europea en marca nacional española. Más información
If you have a new device, product or procedure that solves a technical problem or has a practical advantage, there are different ways to protect it in Spain and other countries. Find out how.
Does your innovation lie in the aesthetics, ornamentation or appearance of your product? Protect it through industrial design. Find out what rights registration confers and how to proceed.
Patents published worldwide are a valuable source of scientific, technical and commercial information.
reembolso del 75% del coste de Búsquedas e Informes Tecnológicos de Patentes. Más información*
If you are an entrepreneur or a company and you want to boost and improve the profitability of your business by adequately protecting the intangible assets of your organisation, in this space you will find what you need.
Law 11/1986 establishes that “Utility Models can protect inventions that are novel and imply inventive steps and that consist of giving an object a configuration, structure or build from which considerable practical advantage can be gained for its use or manufacture”.
Although the requirements for acquiring them are similar, they are less stringent for utility models, so these are used to protect inventions with a lower inventive threshold than patents. In practice, utility model protection is used for lesser innovations that perhaps do not meet patentability criteria.
In most countries where utility model protection is available, patent offices do not examine the background to applications prior to registration. This means that the registration process is often significantly simpler and faster and on average takes about six months.
The duration of the protection for utility models is shorter than that for patents and varies from country to country. In Spain a utility model has a duration of 10 years compared to 20 years for a patent.
The simplicity of the process and the shorter duration mean that obtaining and maintaining utility models is cheaper.
Utility models are considered particularly suitable for SMEs that make "lesser" improvements to existing products or that adapt these products.
In general utility models are improvements to appliances or tools which are already known, in other words, mechanical inventions.
But it is important to emphasise that the Patent Act 11/1986 expressly states that chemical products, foodstuffs and procedures cannot be protected by utility models. For example, a new type of anti-fungal paint cannot be protected as a utility model, but the brush used to paint it can be.
However, from 1 April 2017 when the new Patent Act 24/2015 of 24 July enters into force, only inventions referring to procedures and those that relate to biological material and pharmaceutical substances and compositions will be excluded from utility model protection.
For both patents and utility models, the inventions must be novel, imply inventive step and have industrial applicability.
In the case of utility models, the requirements are similar to those for patents, that is, novelty and inventive step, although they are applied in a less strict sense. Also, utility models will always be objects (instruments, tools, apparatus, devices) whose configuration, structure or build brings considerable advantages for its use or manufacture.
Therefore, procedural inventions, chemical products, foodstuffs or inventions that incorporate biological material cannot be protected as utility models.
From 1 April 2017, when the new Patent Act 24/2015 of 24 July enters into force, only inventions referring to procedures and those that relate to biological material and pharmaceutical substances and compositions will be excluded from utility model protection.
Yes, it is possible to request to change a utility model application to an invention patent application up until the deadline for responding to opposition notices and, where applicable, objections formulated by the SPTO. If no one files a notice of opposition, the applicant may ask for their application to be changed up until the protection is granted.
If the change is accepted the submission date and priority will not change.
The following documentation must be submitted:
- completed application form (form 3101, available in the Utilities/Forms section of the SPTO web page, www.oepm.es) indicating that you are requesting a change of application type (it is important to state “invention patent” as application type, and “change to application type” as the type of request being made and to provide all the details of the original utility model)
- A summary of the invention of no more than 150 words.
Applicants are required to pay a “Change of application type” fee for this procedure, as detailed in the current list of Public Prices and Fees (available in the Utilities section/Public Fees and Prices of the SPTO web page).
The documentation can be presented at the same places indicated for submitting patents or utility models.
Currently, only a small but significant number of countries and regions offer utility model protection. They are: Germany, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, ARIPO, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Slovakia, Spain, Estonia, Ethiopia, Russia, the Philippines, Finland, France, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, OAPI, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, South Korea, the Republic of Moldavia, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Uzbekistan.(http://www.wipo.int/sme/es/ip_business/utility_models/utility_models.htm)
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