In reply to your email addressed to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we would like to inform you that WIPO is an international intergovernmental organization which cooperates mainly with its Member States and is therefore not entitled to advise private parties, except on questions related to its so-called filing and registration systems, such as the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks or the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs.
In addition, we are not sure we understand your question. Should you wish to clarify it, please do not hesitate to do so.
In general, please kindly note that patent rights are territorial in nature; therefore, they are valid only within the territory of the country/region where they have been granted. Thus, in countries where no patent exists on that specific invention, under patent law, there is no legal obstacle for its use by any party.
Please further note that if an application for an invention has been filed with a patent office of a specific country that application has a pending status until a patent is issued or the application is abandoned. In principle, third parties may use the invention on which patent application is still pending, however please kindly note that, in case patent is granted with effect in that country, depending on the applicable law, the patentee may take a legal action against the third parties which used it during the time the application was pending. However, please kindly note that the national laws are different as regards the remedies available to the patentee; therefore, the applicable law of the country concerned needs to be consulted. We would therefore recommend you to consult the relevant patent laws in the WIPO Lex Database.
Please further note that the most prominent and direct sources of legal status information are national patent registers or national patent gazettes or bulletins. Thus, in order to ascertain the legal status of a patent application or a patent in a certain country, we recommend that you contact the industrial property offices of the countries concerned. You can find a list of URLs and a directory of national and regional intellectual property offices on the WIPO web site at:
http://www.wipo.int/directory/es/urls.jsp. A list of IP offices that have made their patent databases available online, free-of-charge, may be found at:
http://www.wipo.int/reference/es/index.html.
For more information on patents, please visit WIPO Frequently Asked Questions as well as the relevant sections of the WIPO webpage “Patents”. You may also wish to refer to the WIPO publication “INVENTING THE FUTURE - An Introduction to Patents for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (Guide on patents for business)”.
We hope you find this information useful. Please send us any feedback or suggestions on how we could improve our services, including on our patent law website.
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