Section 1 Patents and Designs Act 1971

Section 1 of the Patents and Designs Act 1971 is about Patentable inventions. It is under ‘Patents’ of the Act. It provides as follows:

(1) Subject to this section, an invention is patentable–
(a) if it is new, results from inventive activity and is capable of industrial application; or

(b) if it constitutes an improvement upon a patented invention and also is new,
results from inventive activity and is capable of industrial application.

(2) For the purposes of subsection (1) of this section—
(a) an invention is new if it does not form part of the state of the art;
(b) an invention results from inventive activity if it does not obviously follow
from the state of the art, either as to the method, the application, the combination of methods, or the product which it concerns, or as to the industrial result
it produces; and

(c) an invention is capable of industrial application if it can be manufactured or
used in any kind of industry, including agriculture.

(3) In subsection (2) of this section, “the art” means the art or field of knowledge to which an invention relates and “the state of the art” means everything concerning that art or field of knowledge which has been made available to the public anywhere and at any time whatever (by means of a written or oral description, by use or in any other way) before the date of the filing of the patent application relating to the invention or the foreign priority date validly claimed in respect thereof, so however that an invention shall not be deemed to have been made available to the public merely by reason of the fact that, within the period of six months preceding the filing of a patent application in respect of the invention, the inventor or his successor in title has exhibited it in an official or officially recognised international exhibition.

(4) Patents cannot be validly obtained in respect of-
(a) plant or animal varieties, or essentially biological processes for the production
of plants or animals (other than microbiological processes and their products);
or

(b) inventions the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to public
order or morality (it being understood for the purposes of this paragraph that
the exploitation of an invention is not contrary to public order or morality
merely because its exploitation is prohibited by law).

(5) Principles and discoveries of a scientific nature are not inventions for the purposes of this Act.

[/membership]