Patent

A patent (/ˈpætənt/ or /ˈpeɪtənt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process. Patents are a form of intellectual property.

The procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a granted patent application must include one or more claims that define the invention. A patent may include many claims, each of which defines a specific property right. These claims must meet relevant patentability requirements, such as novelty, usefulness, and non-obviousness. The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others, or at least to try to prevent others, from commercially making, using, selling, importing, or distributing a patented invention without permission.

Patent (disambiguation)

A patent a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention.

Types of intellectual property patents

Other meanings of patent

Eolas

Eolas (Irish pronunciation: [ˈoːl̪ˠəsˠ], meaning "Knowledge"; bacronym: "Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems") is a United States technology company accused of mainly acting as a patent troll and described as "The Web’s longest nightmare". It was founded in 1994 by sole employee Michael David Doyle.

His University of California, San Francisco team has claimed to have created the first web browser that supported plugins. They demonstrated it at Xerox PARC, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB meeting. The claim that this was an innovation, advanced to justify their patent application, has been contested by Pei-Yuan Wei, who developed the earlier Viola browser, which added plugin capabilities in 1992, a claim supported by inventor of the WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other Web pioneers. Given only a short time to prepare, Wei was only able to demonstrate Viola's equivalent capabilities for local rather than remote files at the 2003 Eolas v. Microsoft trial, and thus fell short of proving prior art to the trial court's satisfaction. The case with Microsoft over patent 5,838,906 was settled in 2007 for a confidential amount of money after an initial $565 million judgment was stayed on appeal, but the University of California disclosed its piece of the final settlement as $30.4 million. In 2009 Eolas sued numerous other companies over patent number 7,599,985 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments, Oracle and JPMorgan Chase had signed licensing deals with Eolas, while the company continues to seek payoffs from others.