Template:Patent/Supplementary to

We have a field to mark patents as "supplementary to" other patents. Here we explain its purpose and effect this take explaining.

A person who has filed a patent may go on to add to its coverage in a couple of ways:

• File another patent, in the same country, which is explicitly supplementary to the first. These are called certificate d'additions or cert d'additions in the French system. If both patents are granted, the text of the second one applies with the priority date, the filing date, of the first. They are implicitly a package, together.
• File a patent in another country with the same claims as the first patent. This is called a "foreign filing". Often they have the same diagrams as the original. The patent document in the foreign country generally does not refer very exactly the original, but rather just to the country and the filing date, so we have to puzzle these together.

An inventor may compound these filings on top of one another. Patent agents helped make this work, and make money off of it.

The set of patents with the same ancestor patent are called a patent family.

In this wiki, all these kinds of descendants are called "supplementary" patents. We want to record with each of the child, later, patents, the one they are inheriting their priority from. The links go from the later, child patent to the parent(s).

There is a report, the Template:Patent family report, which can list supplementary patents of a particular patent. It will list the ones which are the children of the specified patent, but will miss the grandchildren unless those patents directly refer to the original. The Supplementary to field is a list, so it is possible to put both parents and grandparents in it, which helps the reports, so please do.