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Patents
A patent is a legal document that grants the owner, during its validity, the exclusive right to exploit or disclose the invention that is the subject of the patent to others, as well as the right to prevent the copying, manufacture, sale and export of that invention without his/her consent.
The supplementary protection certificate shall provide additional protection for specific pharmaceutical products and plant protection products protected by a patent, which may be marketed only with the appropriate authorisation.
It is generally recognised that a twenty-year term of protection for pharmaceutical inventions is not sufficient. This is mainly due to the time and cost involved in researching new medicines, where the risk of failure is high, and the process of bringing a medicine to the market, which takes several years, is not negligible. The purpose of the supplementary protection certificate is therefore to maximise the period during which a medicinal product (active substance) is protected, thus giving the holder the exclusive right to exploit the substance.
The topography of semiconductor products protects the interrelated representations of the three-dimensional arrangement of the layers of which the semiconductor product is composed.