It generally takes between 26 and 36 months from the submission of the patent application to its granting. However, there are several circumstances that must be considered.
The patent owner does not entirely lack all rights until granting. Between the submission of the application and the granting of the patent, the applicant has the following rights.
1. Priority right, recognised by a number of international treaties, awards the holder a period of 12 months to present a patent application in other countries and with the same initial submission date.
2. Furthermore, it is possible to gain financial profit from the patent application: the Act enables both patents that have been applied for and those granted to be assigned, used as a bond, and licensed.This means, for example, that a patent application may mortgaged (by taking out a property mortgage), thus financing the initial operations.
3. From the publication of the patent application, applicants are given provisional protection by which they may demand reasonable compensation from any person violating what is later covered by the patent.
Although it can seem excessively long, the procedure is designed to enable the applicant to "buy time", thus enabling them to avoid a major initial expense. It is prolonged artificially to enable the applicant to move on to a subsequent stage only if the outlook for marketing and implementing their patent on the market is good.In short, it is a procedure that is structured into a series of stages in which it is only possible to move on to the next stage when the previous one has been passed, enabling the applicant to stagger and modulate payments.
It is a procedure with a similar structure to that of our most important neighbouring countries.
A procedure to considerably reduce the length of time taken to grant a patent has been approved via the "instruction on the application of internal measures for the implementation of a programme for the accelerated granting of a national patent", if the following requirements are fulfilled:
1. Spanish patent applications do not demand priority.
2. The quicker the applicant completes the procedures without exhausting the legally established periods of time, the greater the reductions in processing times will be.
3. The applicant must request the accelerated granting programme explicitly.
4. The secret period referred to in Article 119of the Patents Act will be respected.
