The Patent Law in the Modern Societies - Essay Example

Patent Law has remained one of the topical issues in modern societies in regard to the protection of the ownership and use of property. Modern society continues to experience the introduction of new ideas, technology, and knowledge among other many things. This has necessitated several nations to adopt and embrace the Patent Law as a means of safeguarding such ownership and use of property and knowledge. Therefore, it guarantees the inventor sole ownership and recognition of the new machine, processes, or technology. These rights have been used by many investors to ensure that they possess the absolute right over the item invented. Therefore, it has successes in offering new invention to the world by ensuring that the inventor enjoys the incentive for a relatively limited time and monopolizes the invention.

Most patent rights have a definite period within which they are active, and they tend to expire after the end of such a period. After expiration, the technology or the idea previously protected goes to the public domain (Adelman). However, the legitimacy of Patent Law has constantly been affected by the cloud of ambiguity which tends to surround the distinction between the concepts of Discovery and Innovation. These two terminologies are often confused, and therefore the implication of Patent Law tends to be misinterpreted in the two cases.

Invention is the process of designing or coming u with an item or even a process which has never existed before. Therefore, the design of the process or the item stems from own personal ideas of the inventor. On the other hand, Discovery implies the act of exploring or finding something which had already existed before but had not been perceived by anybody. Therefore, the discoverer is credited for finding or exploring the item or even the process which has just been existing but is hidden from everybody (Janis).

These two concepts have not been clearly defined in the modern world and have therefore resulted in the undermining of the Patent Law in several jurisdictions. This paper focuses on understanding how this undermining has occurred and instances where the concepts of discovery and inventions have been misunderstood to construe an undermined legitimacy of Patent Law (Reichman). Tenets of what constitutes a legitimate One of the issues which have emerged in regard to the application of inventions and discoveries regards the exact principles or tenets which define this law.