A Point Of Principle

Novelty is one of the three mandatory criteria for patentability of an invention established by the Patent Law of the Russian Federation, the Eurasian patent legislation, and also by the patent legislation of all countries where there is a patent protection system.

Moreover, the "novelty" patentability criterion of an invention has always been considered as the most clearly defined and simple enough to establish that a claimed invention complies with it.

However, the practice of consideration of applications for inventions and administrative cases on invalidation of Russian and Eurasian patents by the Federal Service for IP (Rospatent) in recent years and the consideration of such cases by the IP Court shows that the long-standing approaches to evaluating the "novelty" patentability criterion of an invention have been notably changing.