The English patent system Author:William Martin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: invite competition, is it discovered that the patent is invalid. Whether the patent system ought, or ought not, to give protection to an enterprise in such circu... more »mstances has been a moot point. Although the trend of opinion has been against any such extension of the patent system, the legislature has on more than one occasion leaned in this direction. As we have seen in the previous chapter, an Act of 1835, which was repealed in 1883, empowered the Privy Council to confirm letters patent in the presence of isolated previous publications or a using of the invention unknown to the patentee. A similar leaning is also exhibited in the Act of 1902, which limits the field within which anticipation may be sought and provides for the compulsory working of patents in this country. Readers of the preceding chapter will recognise in these Acts a tendency to revert to the early point of view which regarded the establishment of an industry as the essential merit for which the patentee was deserving of reward. CHAPTER III The Nature of Patent Rights In considering patents, many points arise which for their elucidation involve an exact knowledge of the fundamental nature of the rights that are conferred upon inventors. In this chapter there are set out some of the more important jurisprudential conceptions involved in patent law. By royal grant, special rights or privilegia are conferred upon specific individuals whereby they are placed in the favourable positions which are enumerated. To comprehend fully the nature of the special rights, a reference to the ideas which underlie rights in general is of utility. A legal right may be defined as a legal power to enjoy apresent or potential benefit which it is the duty of others to respect. With every right, therefore, there is the cor...« less