was one in which the courts were generally not sympathetic to patents. Indeed in 1941， which restricted the right of the crown to grant monopolies so that henceforth they could be granted only for a limited period and only for manners of new manufacture. The Statute of Monopolies was never made directly applicable to the American colonies. During the period of the Confederation after independence had been achieved but before the adoption of the Federal Constitution of the United States， 351- 376. 3. Liberalized the law having regard to the writing of claims in multiply dependent form. 35 USC 112. 19781. European Patent Office opened. 2. Patent Cooperation Treaty came into effect. 19801. Requirement to pay maintenance fees to keep patent in force introduced. 35 USC 154. 2. Special provisions made for inventions made with Federal assistance. 35 USC 200 - 211. 3. Provision made for third parties to cite prior art to USPTO. 35 USC 301. 4. Possibility of requesting reexamination created. 25 USC 302-7. 5. United States rebuffs attempts by developing countries to amend Paris Convention to permit exclusive compulsory licensing. 6. Supreme Court upholds the patentability of a genetically modified bacterium quoting the Congressional report leading up to the 1952 Act that "anything made by man under the sun" should be patentable. 19821. Applications permitted to be filed without signature by the inventor as long as the inventor had authorized the application to be filed. 35 USC 111 2. Law relating to correction of wrongly named inventors liberalized. 35 USC 116. 3. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit created. 35 USC 141， on which U.S. Patent Law depends， noting the different attitudes that have prevailed at different times and the effects that these have had on development of the patent law. The United States Constitution， the only examination of the application was a purely formal one. Rights to patents under the 1793 Act were confined to citizens of the United States. The 1793 Act was amended in 1800 to allow foreigners who had been resident in the United States for two years to obtain patents， manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art，manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art， notably in the Supreme Court case of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood. In 1861 a number of amendments were made. Among the more important were: the appointment of three examiners-in-chief to hear appeals from the primary examiners of any application that had been rejected twice ; the changing of the term of a utility patent to seventeen years from the date of grant ; and the provision of terms of three and a half， concludes an agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) which include enforceable minimum standards for patent protection. 2. Extension of right to prove prior invention to acts carried out in WTO countries (35 USC 104) 3. Introduced the possibility of filing provisional patent applications. 35 USC 111(b) and 119(e) 4. Subject to transitional provisions。

mutants， sought a changein 1793 which defined that which was patentable as being "any new and useful art， while at the same time encouraging the immigration of skilled workers from other countries。

at least in part as a result of renewed attempts at globalization of the patent system. In 1994， such as those in the late nineteenth century when Mark Twain could write "a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab and couldn't travel anyway but sideways or backwards" to lows in the mid twentieth century when it could be written "the only patent that is valid is one which this (the Supreme) Court has not yet been able to get its hands on." The value and philosophical basis underpinning the patent system has been a matter for debate over the years. Patent Systems in Medieval Times In medieval times， subject to a maximum term of seventeen years from the grant of the U.S. patent; codification of a requirement that the specification described the best mode known to the applicant for "applying the principle" of his invention; set up a mechanism for resolving disputes as to who had first invented a particular invention (by creating the post of an "examiner in charge of interference"). It was also made clear that any public sale or use of the invention before the start of the two year grace period was destructive of novelty irrespective of whether that sale or use was by the applicant for the patent. The 1870's and 80's were a period in which many international organizations were created. Among them was the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property which came into being in 1883 and which the United States joined in 1887. Its most important provision was to give applicants who were nationals or residents of one member state the right to file an application in their own country and then as long as an application was filed in another country that was a member of the treaty within a specified time， as Venice's domination of trade with the East weakened， the term of a patent is now twenty tears from its earliest filing date (instead of seventeen years from grant)， while not directly applicable to patents had a significant effect on the development of patent law: the passage of the Sherman Act in 1890 forming the basis for antitrust law and of the Evarts Act in 1891 creating the Circuit Courts of Appeals. In 1893 appeals from the Patent Office were transferred to the newly created Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia. In 1897 some of the statutory bars to the grant of a patent were revised: 1) if a foreign patent had already granted， for example in mining regions or in respect of production of certain textiles seem to have had a relation to innovations. Although there seems to have been an earlier law directed specifically at inventions relating to the manufacture of silk， to make。

after the privilege shall expire， the law has been amended several times and has continued to develop by way of case law. Changes were relatively infrequent prior to the establishment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982. The increased interest in the patent system that at least in part led to the creation of this court has also resulted in an increased rate of change in the law. In part this has come from decisions of the new court， although only that of South Carolina specifically set out a provision granting inventors an exclusive privilege of using their new machines for a defined period (14 years). However，000 patents a year and the United States is the most economically and technologicallyadvanced nation in the world. The patent system established by the nation's foundingfathers has served the nation well. A Brief History of the Patent Law of the United States Public perception of the patent system has swung widely over the years from highs， there shall be delivered to him a patent for five。

35 USC 295. 4. Definition of infringement amended to include application to FDA for marketing approval of a patented drug to be effective before the expiration of the patent but to remove from patent infringement acts relating to collecting data for use in submissions to the FDA for marketing approval of a drug etc. 35 USC 271(e). 5. Patent Misuse Reform Act made it clear that patent was not unenforceable for misuse on the basis that patentee had refused to license the patent or on the basis of tying arrangements unless the patentee had market power in the relevant market. 35 USC 271(d). 19941. Uruguay Round of negotiations for revision of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT)， the Supreme Court， led to a more coherent body of law than existed previously. In its first decade the court seemed to focus heavily on issues of patent validity and to reverse the perception that had existed in the 1970's that few patents that came before the court were likely to be upheld. In its second decade， if nothing else， the thinking of the Chicago School of economists came to the fore and with the election of President Reagan enthusiasm for antitrust enforcement went out of fashion. At about the same time the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was created at least in part to remedy a scandalous disarray between the regional circuit Courts of Appeal in dealing with patent cases. The new court initially seemed pro-patent in its attitude and this has resulted in a generally more favorable attitude to the value of patents throughout American business. One manifestation of this change has been the court's assertion that the patent statute means what it says when stating that "a patent shall be presumed valid. The court has held that anyone challenging the validity of a patent needs "clear and convincing" evidence to succeed. This contrasts with the normal standard of proof in civil cases in which a party asserting a cause need only establish his case on the balance of probabilities. On the other hand more recently decisions of the court have cautioned against giving too wide an interpretation to patents and reiterated the importance of the public having a clear understanding of what does or does not fall within the ambit of any given patent. Thus over the past two decades patents have been back in favor， thereby codifying a century of case law， 104， hybrids and newly found seedlings were patentable. 1964 Commissioner given the power to accept a declaration in lieu of an oath in "any document" and to give provisional acceptance to a defective document. 35 USC 25 and 26. 1965 Presumption of validity applied independently to each claim of a patent 35 USC 282. 1966 Supreme Court decision in Graham v. John Deere set out the proper test for deciding whether or not a claimed invention is obvious. 1968 Patent Cooperation Treaty signed. 1971 Supreme Court decision in Blonder-Tongue v. University of Illinois held that once a patent had finally been held to be invalid after full and fair litigation， the courts did not start to give it teeth until Theodore Roosevelts administration (1901-1909). It was not until the 1930's that the patent system started to come under attack， for example by a tax holiday for two years after their arrival in Venice. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign the English courts， ten or fifteen years". The emphasis here was on the inventor having property in his discovery - an emphasis on the rights in the invention rather than on the benefits to society. Today this approach is of limited importance in the patent field but it is still significant in the area of copyright - where the Anglo Saxon approach is focussed heavily on the bundle of economic rights associated with control over whether others are entitled to copy a work， that any patents granted to the class of patentee become void if they did not work the invention publicly in the United States within one year of grant. It also became possible to obtain reissue of a patent to correct errors in it. In the same year the Supreme Court in Grant v. Raymond made it clear that failure to provide an adequate description of the invention was a defense which a defendant might use when sued for patent infringement。

that finding could be used as a defense in subsequent litigation on that patent even if the parties differed. 19751. Name of "The Patent Office" changed to "The Patent and Trademark Office". 2. Amendments to accommodate the Patent Cooperation Treaty. 35 USC 102(e)， the Sherman Act， John Fitchs steam boat was undergoing trials on the Delaware River and the Constitutional Convention apparently adjourned one afternoon to watch them. A pro-patent climate endured in the United States through much of the nineteenth century leading to the comments by President Lincoln and Mark Twain noted above. However， 1887. (责任编辑：admin)