Utility Issues In Protection Of Biological Inventions In Mexico

By: Oscar M. Becerril

The concept of utility is relatively new in the Mexican legislation on industrial property, since it was for the first time introduced in the 1991 law and was more clearly defined only in the 1994 law. Prior to the 1991 law, the Mexican patent system was extremely defective and the vast majority of the inventions were not considered as patentable, which therefore restricted the possibility of obtaining patents only to the mechanical inventions and to the methods of obtaining chemical compounds.

The new patent law and particularly the 1994 law, however, by allowing patentability to practically all types of inventions, including those pertaining in the biotechnological field, has practically removed from the analysis the patentability issues and, instead, has now introduced the utility issues which are already being used in connection with the examination of patent applications and that no doubt will have relevance in the future as a reason for the