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.
It is possible to request a patent in other countries based on a utility model since the PRIORITY RIGHT (as set out in the Paris Union Convention) also applies to other countries, with the same 12 month duration as is used for patents.
You should also bear in mind that not all countries permit utility model protection and therefore the only way to obtain protection for an invention is through a patent.
In the case of the European patent, it is possible to obtain the priority right based on a prior utility model application in Spain.
Under current patent granting systems in Spain, if you opt for the General Procedure, the State of the Art Report is not binding and is only used for helping to evaluate the patent.
If this SAR shows that the patent application is not novel or lacks inventive step, the applicant can:
- decide not to continue with the procedure and withdraw the application
- make the changes permitted by law in order to try to improve the patent application, or opt to continue the procedure via the preliminary examination route or the general granting procedure.
- Continue with the general granting procedure without making any changes. In this case, the risk is that, once the patent has been granted, a third party may try to cancel it because it does not comply with legal requirements.
If you have developed a novel product or process, you should consider the option of patenting and include it in your business strategy.
In general, companies have various alternatives available to them for protecting their investment in innovation. One of them is to keep the results secret, under the so-called "industrial secret". The other alternative consists of seeking the protection offered by industrial property laws: patents and utility models. Before deciding which option to go for, it is worth considering the strategy you wish to follow in order to prevent third parties from benefiting free of charge from the work undertaken by the innovating company.
Patenting offers greater security than industrial secret: anybody who uses this invention without authorisation can be prosecuted, whether they knew about the patent's existence or not. In contrast, industrial secret offers much weaker protection that is limited to demanding financial compensation from anyone required to respect the secret (basically employees) and who publishes it or uses it for their own benefit or that of others. In other words, industrial secrets are only protected against espionage.
Las oficinas de patentes otorgan las patentes a cambio de la divulgación de la invención, de manera que pasa a estar disponible para el público en general.
Sólo en la primera fase del procedimiento de concesión de patentes, el expediente es secreto, pues se evalúa si la invención tiene relevancia para la seguridad nacional, en cuyo caso la patente sería Secreta.
Pero en todos los casos, y siempre y cuando el solicitante no retire la solicitud, la patente será publicada y divulgada en la forma que establece la ley.
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