Definition
As pointed out by Peter Prescott QC, the expression "patent application" is ambiguous. It can bear two different meanings:
- The legal state of affairs that is constituted when a person requests the competent authority to grant him a patent and that request is still outstanding.
- The content of the document or documents which that person filed with a view to initiating the above; most pertinently, a description of the invention together with at least one claim purporting to define it.
The first of those – the request for a legal privilege to which you will be entitled if your application be well founded – is an institutional fact, and is temporal by its very nature. It ceases to exist as soon as your application is withdrawn, is refused, or is granted. The second of those, the informational content of the document as filed (or in other, prosaic words, the piece of paper), is a historical fact that never goes away, no matter what the Patent Office does, or anyone else does. It exists in perpetuity. The expression "application" is often employed without being conscious of its ambiguity. The expression is capable of misleading even experienced professionals.
Read more about this topic: Patent Application
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“One definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals—just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)