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On the 11 September 2013 the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) published patent number GB2500000. The road to this landmark figure has been long, starting in the fifteenth century when the Crown granted monopolies to manufacturers and traders. Henry VI granted the earliest known English patent for invention to John of Utynam in 1449 which gave him a twenty year monopoly for a method of making stained glass. However, patents were not numbered until 1852 when the patent system was overhauled.
Britain's patent system served the country well during the dramatic technological changes of the industrial revolution. However, by the mid-19th century it had become extremely inefficient. The Great Exhibition of 1851 accelerated demands for patent reform.
Up to that time, any prospective patentee had to present a petition to no less than seven offices and at each stage to pay certain fees. Charles Dickens described the procedure in exaggerated form, somewhat derisively, in his spoof, "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent", published in the 19th-century popular journal "Household Words"; Dickens' inventor visits 34 offices (including some abolished years before).
The Patent Office came about to meet public concerns over this state of affairs, and was established by the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852. This completely overhauled the British patent system and laid down a simplified procedure for obtaining patents of invention. Legal fees were reduced and the publication of a single United Kingdom patent replaced the issuing of separate patents for each nation of the Union.
A subsequent Act in 1883 brought into being the office of Comptroller General of Patents and a staff of patent examiners to carry out a limited form of examination; mainly to ensure that the specification described the invention properly, but without any investigation into novelty. An important milestone in the development of the British patent system was the Act of 1902, which introduced a limited investigation into the novelty of the invention before granting a patent. This required patent examiners to perform a search through United Kingdom specifications published within 50 years of the date of the application. Even with this restricted search, a vast amount of preparatory work was involved and an additional 190 examiners assisted the existing staff of 70 examiners.
By 1905, to enable searching, patent specifications from 1855 to 1900 had been abridged and classified in 1,022 volumes arranged in 146 classes according to subject. By 1907, the abridgement volumes extended back to the first patent to have a number: Patent No. 1 of 1617 granted to Rathburn & Burges for "Engraving and Printing Maps, Plans &c".
The legislation in force at present is the 1977 Patents Act. This was the most radical piece of patents legislation for nearly 100 years. The Act sets out to ensure that the patent system is well suited to the needs of modern industry, sufficiently flexible to accommodate future changes in technology and adapted to operate in an international context.
A patent gives you the ability to take legal action to try to stop others from copying, manufacturing, selling, and importing your invention without your permission. The existence of your patent may be enough on its own to stop others from trying to exploit your invention. If it does not, the patent gives you the right to take a legal action under civil law to try to stop them exploiting your invention. This may involve suing the alleged infringer through the courts, which is costly and time consuming because it involves expert legal advice. The patent owner needs to be able to pay for this civil legal action and advice themselves, although they may get some costs back if they win their case.
The patent also allows you to: sell the invention and all the intellectual property (IP) rights, license the invention to someone else but retain all the IP rights, discuss the invention with others in order to set up a business based around the invention.
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