Category:German patent administration

The main related article is Kaiserlichen Patentamt.

There are some distinctive attributes of German patent history that affect some of our data. (1) Technical evaluations were always required and standards were higher than in any other country. Rejection percentages were high -- over half, and in some years 90%. These standards were high for "novelty" and we would like to collect other details. (2) Patent terms were brief -- generally on the order of 5 years. So one reason there were not many patents perhaps was that the monopoly it provided was brief and the territory it applied to was not very large. (3) German patents were evaluated by a single office in Berlin, except that before about 1878 there was more diversity among the principalities and costs were different in the different principalities (detailed in the Donges and Selgert papers). The concept of a "foreign" patent is different then. (4) Distinctive administrative things must have happened in WWI but we don't have a specific history of this. What happened to foreign applications then, e.g. those coming from countries with which Germany was at war?