Patent protection for inventions is administered, under industrial property legislation, by the Industrial Property Office of the Slovak Republic (the “Office”), which grants a patent by its decision. An invention is protected by patent law only once the Office has issued that decision.
Patentable inventions
Under Act No. 435/2001 Coll. (the Patent Act), technical inventions must always meet 3 conditions for a patent to be granted, namely they must:
- be new
- involve an inventive step
- and be capable of industrial application
An invention is regarded as new if it does not form part of the existing state of the art, which in practice means that, up to the moment the patent application was filed, the technical solution on which the invention is based had not been made available to the public in any way.
An invention satisfies the requirement of an inventive step if, to a person skilled in the field, it is not something that simply follows from the existing state of the art. This is known as the “non-obviousness” requirement. Put simply, the invention must not be a solution that any ordinary specialist in the field could have come up with.
Industrial applicability means that the invention makes it possible to produce something, or that the invention itself can be produced or used, in any branch of the economy. It is important to remember that the law refers to the possibility of repeated production or repeated use, not to one-off prototypes or “single-use” items that cannot be replicated.
Practical examples:
- Under the conditions above, even a technical solution for a device that is several years “old” will be regarded as new if the company that developed it has kept it secret, since the public has been entirely unaware that the invention exists. By contrast, an invention developed at the same time but independently by a commercial firm and a group of independent researchers will not be regarded as new if the scientists have published the results of their development work, for example on the internet. It is precisely the publication of such a technical solution that means the invention is no longer “new”, even though its “age” is in fact much lower than in the first case.
- If, for example, a technical solution for an existing household appliance merely alters its external dimensions, the inventive step requirement for a patent will not be met, since any specialist will know that, where the nature of the appliance allows, such an “invention” can be achieved without any further technical research.
An invention relying on a so-called “perpetual motion machine” cannot be registered, as it lacks industrial applicability. The principle cannot be used in the real economy because it contradicts the laws of physics. Interestingly, unsuccessful attempts to patent perpetual motion machines were made, for example, in former Czechoslovakia.
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