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search conducted by one of
a handful of International Search
Authorities (the Australian, Japanese, Russian and United
States Patent Offices, the European Patent Office and to a
more limited extent the Swedish and Austrian Offices); Chapter
2 establishes an International Preliminary Examination.
Participating states are not obliged to adhere to both
Chapters, nor is an applicant obliged to have the preliminary
examination. The Treaty is not founded upon any international
agreement about the grounds of validity for a patent. The
Preliminary Examination accordingly leads to a report on a
number of basic questions (patentabie subject matter, novelty,
inventive step and industrial applicability) in accordance
with criteria that are defined only generally in the Treaty.
Nevertheless, for countries which have no examining system, the
report may provide a basis upon which a national patent office,
applying its own law, can decide whether or not to grant a
patent. In the hope of opening this opportunity to developing
countries, it was hastily decided to introduce the second
Chapter along with the first in 1978. Apart from this, the
main advantage of the Treaty is practical: it allows an
applicant to institute applications in numerous countries
by a single procedure; and to delay his final decision to apply
in a number of countries (with the official fees, agents' fees and translation costs that this entails) for a period of
20 months (or, where Chapter 2 can be employed, for
25 months) after his priority date. What the Treaty does not
provide is an "international patent", since in the end each
/national