Legal Life of Most Patents | Canm.org

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The Federal Government issues patents to offer temporary protection to inventors thereby ensuring that no one can duplicate and sell one?s patent for profit. All of the applicable patent detail is then made public by The South African Patent and Trademark Company by loading it onto their databases. You might not have been aware of this fact, as the majority of people just assume that legal patent protection plans are applicable for a lifetime, but in actual fact, they all end at some time or another. Each patent is unique and therefore all have different life spans depending on the actual type of product or service.

There are three main types of patents such as design patents, utility patents and plant patents.

A utility patent involves the manufacturing of articles. These patents have a legal lifespan of patent protection for up to twenty years.

A design patents involves the manufacturing of the design of fabrics. These patents have a shorter lifespan compared to utility patents, but still relatively long enough as it has a legal patent protection of up to fourteen years.

A plant patent involves the development and reproduction of new plant assortments that reproduces asexually. These patents have the same lifespan of utility patents being twenty years of legal patent protection.

Out of all of the different patent types, it seems that plant patents enjoy the most benefits as there are no applicable future maintenance fees towards the plant patent protection plan. However, that is not the case with Design patents and utility patents. Each of these patent plans is liable to pay maintenance fees towards the protection plan. These fees are payable during the 4th, 8th and twelfth years of the patent life span towards the patent protection plan?s maintenance fees.

Source: http://www.canm.org/legal-life-of-most-patents/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=legal-life-of-most-patents

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