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When inventors come up with a new device, the first thing they want to do is patent it. Patents are a government's way of giving an inventor ownership of his or her creation. For a certain period of time, patent-holders are allowed to control how their inventions are used, allowing them to reap the financial rewards of their work. Patents are a palpable, legally-binding manifestation of a person's genius and innovation; they allow a person to actually own an IDEA.

Most modern nations, there is an established system for protecting intellectual property, the product of a person or company's originality and creativity. The broadest protection of this sort is the copyright. Copyrights are intended to protect "original works of authorship" that are in a tangible form. This includes paintings, books, movies, choreographed dances (if the steps are written down), music, architecture and all other sorts of art and idea.

Other sorts of intellectual-property protection are much narrower in scope. Trademarks protect designs and phrases that businesses use to distinguish their product from other companies' products, and trade secrets protect proprietary information that must be kept secret in order for a business to profit (the recipe for Coca-cola, for example).

Of all of the forms of intellectual-property protection, patents are the most complex and tightly regulated. Patents are basically copyrights for inventions, defined by U.S. patent law as "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." Unlike copyrights, patents protect the idea or design of the invention, rather than the tangible form of the invention itself. Consequently, patenting something is a much trickier procedure than copyrighting something. Patents are the most complicated type of intellectual property, as well as the most restrictive. To patent an invention, you have to meet a number of requirements. First of all, the invention must be sufficiently novel. That is, it must be substantially unlike anything that is already patented, has already been on the market or has been written about in a publication. In fact, you can't even patent your own invention if it has been on the market or discussed in publications for more than a year.

Adaptations of earlier inventions can be patented as long as they are nonobvious, meaning that a person of standard skill in the area of study wouldn't automatically come up with same idea upon examining the existing invention. For example, you can't patent the concept of making a toaster that can handle more pieces of bread at once, because that is only taking an existing invention and making it bigger. For an invention to be patented, it must be innovative to the point that it wouldn't be obvious to others.

In patent law, the term "invention" is defined loosely so that it can encompass a wide variety of objects. Obviously, if patents have to apply to things that don't exist yet, then the legal language must be fairly vague. In addition to standard technological machines and machine advancements, you can also patent certain computer programs, industrial processes and unique designs (such as tire or shoe-tread patterns). While none of the elements in these creations are new, the inventor may have combined them in a unique and innovative way. In the language of patent law, this constitutes an invention.

For further details, visit following sites:
http://patinfo.nic.in/
www.uspto.gov
www.indianpatents.org.in
www.med.nyu.edu/oil/handbook