PATENTS' WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE COSMETIC INDUSTRY By JAMES G. FIFE, M.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.I.C. THE CRANT of Letters Patent for invention in the United Kingdom is of very considerable antiquity, and in the Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which prohibited the grant of mono- polies in general, a special exception was made in respect of Letters Patent for invention, because in Section 6 of the Statute it is provided ß "6. Provided also, that any declaration before mentioned shall not extend to any letters patent and grants of privilege for the term of fourteen years or under, hereafter to be made, of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures within this realm to the true and first inventor and inventors of such manu- factures, which others at the time' of making such letters patent and grants shall not use, so as also they be not contrary to the law nor mischievous to the State by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally incon- venient' the said fourteen years to be accounted from the date of the first letters patent or grants of such privilege hereafter to be made, but that the same shall be of such force as they should be if this Act had never been made, and of none other." Originally separate Letters Patent were granted for England and Wales and the town of Berwick on Tweed, Scotland, and Ireland, but by the Act of 1852 a United Kingdom Patent was established, and the centenary of this event has just been celebrated by the Patent Office, the celebration in- cluding a very interesting exhibition of the patent specifications relating to famous and curious inventions. ß The Statute Law relating to patents has been revised on numerous occasions, the last revision being in 1949, when the law was completely codified for the first time since 1907 and many important changes were introduced in the law, some of which are of especial interest to the chemi- cal industry, including inventions relating to cosmetics. Before dealing with the important innovations introduced by the Pat- ents Act, 1949, I would first outline the procedure for obtaining the grant of Letters Patent in this country. PROCEDURE IN THE U.K. The first step is for the inventor or his assignee to make an applica- 217

JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS tion to the Comptroller, and this application may be accompanied either by a provisional or a complete specification. Usually a provisional specification is filed because this gives the applicant a period of one year in which to perfect his invention before the complete specification is filed. The provisional specification should describe the invention, and in view of certain provisions of the new Act to which I will refer later, it is advisable to describe the inven- tion in as great detail as possible, while at the same time foreshadowing the future work which the inventor hopes he will be able to carry out before the complete specification is filed. In other words, there is no real danger in drafting some parts of the provisional specification in fairly wide terms, provided, of course, that there is also some more detailed description to which the inventor may retreat if he finds that it is impracticable in the complete specification to claim the invention widely, either because the wider _ aspects of the invention are already known or because the wide state- ment includes embodiments which are not useful, or possibly because time has not permitted the inventor to investigate the matter sufficiently to give an adequate description which will support the wide statement. When the complete specification is filed it is necessary to describe 'the best method known to the inventor of carrying the invention into effect. The amount of detail to be given will necessarily depend upon the circumstances of the case, 218 because clearly it is unnecessary to describe in great detail matters which are well known to all workers in the field that is to say, matters of common general knowledge. Nevertheless, the description should always be sufficiently full to enable a person who is skilled in the art concerned to carry the invention into effect without the use of the inven- tive faculty. Again, the amount of description required will depend upon the scope of the invention, and this scope will be determined by what are known as the claims. The claims are a very important part of the specification and will be found at the end of the complete specifica- tion. They are a concise statement of the ambit of the monopoly claimed by the Applicant and require care and consideration in drafting, be- cause anything falling outside the claims is not protected by the patent. Thus, the claims should be wide enough to cover the invention, but not so wide as to be invalid for any reason. It is usual to insert a series of claims, some being of a more limited character, in order to provide several lines of defence should the wider claims be invalid for any reason. After the complete specification has been filed it is considered by one of the examiners of the Patent Office, who makes a search in British specifications published during the past fifty years and who, if he so desires, may also bring to the notice of the applicant other material published in the United Kingdom before the date of the application.