The different branches of IP law have common aims, such as encouraging innovation and creativity by allowing their owners to receive – at least partially – the benefits that their creations produce for society. However, these different branches have registered a considerably different historic evolution.
Some of those rights (trade marks, patents and copyrights) go back many centuries, while other rights are more recent (plant breeders' rights, database rights, scientific data protection, etc), which is closely related to the technological revolution that took place mainly in the second half of the 20th century.
In other cases, the new technological developments affect the already existing branches of IP rights. This is precisely the situation of nanotechnology and patents.
Specialists agree that the major technological advances in the short term will take place in the biotechnology, energy technology and nanotechnology areas.
Nanotechnology can be defined as the new technological developments that allow the control of the behavior of matter and the structure at the molecular and atomic levels, that is the exploitation of processes or phenomena that occur at the nanometric scale.
In this small scale, the properties of the matter, such as its ability to conduct electricity, color, magnetism, etc, change unexpectedly. The main areas of nanotechnology applications are material developments, information technology, and the relevant area of medical applications.
The relationship between nanotechnology developments and patent rights presents deep challenges, such as:
- The existing controversy related to the patentability of the new properties of materials developed through nanotechnology (are the new properties of the materials obtained through nanotechnology an invention or a discovery?).
- The special training required for examining patent applications related to nanotechnology developments, since these developments comprise different specialties and few professionals are able to analyse multidisciplinary technological issues.
In order to face this situation, the European Patent Office established interdisciplinary teams to examine nanotechnology patent applications.
The Argentine Patent Office has received more than 100 patent applications related to nanotechnology developments, which are under analysis and their resolution is pending.
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