Protectia has the experience and professional staff to provide advice, prepare and manage the protection of inventions in Spain.

Filing an Invention Patent in Spain:

A patent of invention protects technological innovations characterized by three features:

  • Novelty: the patent has not been disclosed to the public prior to its date of application neither in Spain nor in foreign countries (it is novel worldwide).
  • The patent involves inventive step: the invention does not obviously result from the “state of the art” for a person skilled in the art. The state of the art comprises everything relating to the subject-matter of the patent which has been disclosed to the public in Spain or abroad prior to the filing date of the application.
  • Industrial application: the subject-matter of the patent can be produced or used in any class of industry.

Patent grant bestows protection in Spain for a non-extendable term of 20 years, this being subjected to the payment of an annual fee to keep the patent in force.

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From the time of filing a patent application, the applicant has a 12-month period to extend said application to any other country or group of countries by means of direct applications in the countries of interest or by means of existing international agreements.

patent registration in spain

An essential feature of this procedure is the existence of the so-called Report on the State of the Art (RSA). The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) defines the degree of novelty and inventive step of the patent through this report.

Once the RSA is published, a period is opened where the applicant chooses one of the two filing paths to proceed currently allowed by the Spanish patent law:

Novelty examination: This is an optional grant procedure. In the future, this option will be the only procedure in invention patent processing. The features of this novelty examination include:

  • The results of the RSA (novelty examination) are studied
  • Oppositions can be filed
  • If the novelty examination is negative or the oppositions which may arise are accepted, the patent application will be refused.

General grant procedure: As of today, this is the most widely used procedure through which after applying for the corresponding Report on the State of the Art, the patent application is granted. This procedure will be abolished in the long run. The features of this procedure include:

  • No oppositions can be filed
  • Observations can be filed
  • Patentability study is not performed
  • Direct granting

If the applicant fails to choose any of these two patenting options on time in the period of 3 months, the SPTO will automatically follow the general grant procedure.

The processing duration of an application for patenting an invention in Spain is approximately 3 years.