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The Best Patent Practice Or Mere Compromise? A Review Of The Current Draft Of The Substantive Patent Law Treaty And A Proposal For A "First-To-Invent" Exception For Domestic Applicants, Toshiko Takenaka

Articles

Part I of this paper I review the past efforts of patent harmonization. In Part II, I review the current draft of the Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) and compare its major articles with Title 35 of the United States Code, the European Patent Convention (EPC), and Japanese Patent Law (JPL). In Part III, I analyze the changes expected by the integration of the SPLT into U.S. patent practice and examine if such changes would result in the best patent practice. I propose that the best practice takes into account underlying patent policies in such instances in which the changes …