76.Section 5 of the 1977 Act concerns the international system for establishing a “priority date” of an invention for which patent protection is sought. The date that a patent application is filed in a first country establishes that invention’s “priority date”, and later patent applications (for the same invention) filed in other countries can then be treated as having been filed on that same priority date. Generally speaking, those later applications must be filed within 12 months of the first filing. This system was established by the Paris Convention of 1883, and each country to which it applies is called a “convention country” in section 5 of the 1977 Act.
The data on this page is available in the alternative data formats listed:
All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. This site additionally contains content derived from EUR-Lex, reused under the terms of the Commission Decision 2011/833/EU on the reuse of documents from the EU institutions. For more information see the EUR-Lex public statement on re-use.
