Patents

=Patents=

Patents is the limited right given by the government to someone who is an inventor. It gives the inventor the permission to make, use, sell and license an invention for a certain amount of time. The Patent Act of Canada gives the inventor a limited time of twenty years to do what they wish with the invention. The patent does not involve the actual physical invention but the way of creating it and how it works.

Copyright is in affect as soon as something new is created but the patent is only in affect as soon as the right is granted from the government. For patent permission to be granted, the invention has to have three characteristics. 1. It must be a novel. It doesn't have to be something that had never existed, but it has to have a new method or feature that is new to the creation. It has to be something that at first wasn't available until it was created. 2. It can't be something obvious. People can't patent something that had no effort in creating or any special knowledge. 3. It must have a purpose for its creation. It needs to be able to do what is said it can do. Needs to be proven and explained how it works.

Copyright lasts for 50 years and patents only last for 20 years. Copyright protects any creation whether it has use or not while patents can only be granted to creations that have an actual use. Copyright also protects expressions of ideas and what is created from the while patents do protects the ideas and the understanding. It is much more expensive to patent something than it is to copyright a creation.