Skip to main content

Defining Patent Utility: Potential of a Patent or Commercial Viability of the Patented Product?

Pravin Anand and Prachi Agarwal delve into the numerous theories and criteria spanning jurisdictions that have spawned in light of patentability requirements.

There are essentially three requirements that are to be satisfied for an invention to be patentable: novelty, inventive step (non-obviousness) and utility. As opposed to its other counterparts, the requirement of utility has been relatively placed at a lower threshold. In fact under the law as it stands today, patent protection would virtually never be refused due to lack of utility/industrial applicability. However, notwithstanding the extremely low utility hurdle, claimed inventions can and do fail the utility requirement. The question, thus, is how much utility is sufficient to satisfy the requirement under patent law?

The concept of utility has been defined and recognized in different manners in different jurisdictions in the form of inventions that are useful, have industrial applicability or are capable of exploitation in an industry etc.; all of these terms are generally viewed as synonymous. For example, in India, the utility requirement emanates from the requirement of an invention being ‘capable of industrial application’ which is defined under Section 2(ac) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970 as ‘capable of being made or used in an industry’ and a patent is liable to be revoked if the same is not useful.

This chapter was published in Asia IP January 2016.

Read more

Most Recent

News & Insights

VIEW ALL
News & Updates
Aug 25, 2025

At the FICCI–ICRIER Conference on SEPs (23rd August 2025), our Managing Partner Mr. Pravin Anand shared his vision on how India can evolve from being

Conference on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs)
News & Updates
Aug 24, 2025

‘Intellectual Property for a company/ creator is as critical and important as human rights for an individual,’ this guiding belief at ANAND AND ANAND

IAM Strategy 300
Thought Leadership
Aug 21, 2025

‘First published on IAM’ By:  Vaishali R Mittal Patent examination by the Indian Patent Office (IPO) has slowed down dramatically over the last few

Patent examination slowdown risks harming India’s IP momentum
Thought Leadership
Jul 28, 2025

‘First published on Asia IP’ By: Pravin Anand In the book What is Life, written in 1944 by theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, the author states: “A

Human versus machine consciousness