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 It ceases to exist as soon as your application is withdrawn, is refused, or is granted.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:
“... we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)