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.
- DIRECTLY country by country, making the relevant applications in each of the countries where you want to register the invention.
- By means of a EUROPEAN PATENT. The EPO website gives information on how to apply for a European patent (http://www.epo.org/).
- By making a PCT application. The WIPO website gives information on the main features of this system (http://www.wipo.int/pct/es/).
Applicants can choose voluntarily between the General Granting Procedure or the Procedure with Preliminary Examination.
In both cases, once the Report on the State of the Art (SAR) has been published, there follows a three month period in which the applicant can decide which procedure they would like their application to be processed under.
If the applicant opts for the General Procedure, the application will eventually be successful, provided that the applicant continues with the process and even though the SAR is unfavourable.
If the applicant chooses the Procedure with Preliminary Examination the SPTO will examine the patent request thoroughly and proceed to grant or reject it (either totally or partially).
On 1 April 2017, the New Patent Act 24/2015, of 24 July, will enter into force and all applications will be processed following the procedure with Preliminary Examination.
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.
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