Patents are a way of protecting your hard-worked invention by the means of ownership and some exclusive rights as an award of finding something useful for mankind. To have clarity on what types of protection you will be granted in a patent, patent claims are drawn. Patent claims are a way of making choices of the types and parts of protection that are demanded by the inventor so that the inventor can willfully claim for any infringement that might take place in the future and not be caught in any type of unwanted trouble.
The patent claims describe the scope or the extent of protection given to an invention for the purpose of making claimed decisions and ownership of the invention. An invention may not be fully newly developed or patentable, there may be just a part or parts of the invention that are newly developed and therefore the whole invention cannot be patented, and only that particular part is patentable. Here, patent claims come into the picture and clearly define the expectations of the inventor and the parts that he wants to protect.
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Types of Patent Claims
There can be different types of patent claims that can be there in a patent application, and we will learn about them further in the article:
Independent and Dependent Claims: These are the claims described initially with the help of which the novelty of the invention is defined. They claim that the invention is patentable, and this is independent of any other claim and can be described individually. Any other claim can be made according to this independent claim which will be called a dependent claim.
Dependent claims are the ones that elaborate the patent independent claims. They explain the features of the invention in a more descriptive way. The dependent claims can only be explained by the independent claims. These are not independent of their own claims but have a dependent explanation on the basis of independent claims.
An independent claim can be infringed by anyone, but dependent claims are only infringed if any independent claim is hindered. A dependent claim cannot be directly infringed.
Composition Claims: These are the claims for the composition of chemicals. Chemical inventions are done by mix-matching two or more chemicals to produce another useful chemical. This invention should be useful for any purpose and the claims demanded by the inventor in such an invention are called composition claims.
Apparatus claims: There are some inventions that are done for producing structural designs. The claims made for such inventions are called as apparatus claims. Only the outer structure of the invention is claimed under this type of patent.
Method Claims: In this type ofclaim, the methods of the invention are protected by the patents. These methods are the processes or the steps that are required to be taken so that a useful outcome is obtained. The method of the process should be in a specified order that needs to be performed to get the desired output.
Any method that is not in the order and doesn’t produce desired output will not be considered under claims and the inventor will not be able to patent such an invention.
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Overview
So, these are some of the types of patent claims that can be considered by the inventor, and he can get his patent by the help of these patent claims. These patent claims give direction to the inventor to have a clear understanding of what type of protection he is demanding and also can have a clear perception of what to demand in case of legal trouble.
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