Certificat d'addition

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As a document type, in terms of administrative phraseology, the “certificat d’addition”, as a nominally distinct type of document, may be unique to the administrative culture of France. Other nations have similarly filed patents, specifically making reference to earlier patents upon which they are building, but these additions have no different document type name, and are numbered in the ordinary manner as they fall chronologically in the flow of patents filed with the appropriate national patent office.

Within the French system(s) of patent registration and documentation, a “certificat d’addition”, almost invariably abbreviated as “cert d’addition”, or even “cert d’add”, is a patent registered in a manner specifically and formally treating it as an addition to some parent patent. Original documents show both the earlier number and a new number, which will be invariably and conspicuously lower than the number of the parent patent and conspicuously lower than the numbers given to filed near its point in time. In cases in which we discover a patent solely by way of such catalogues as the Bulletin Officiel de la propriété industrielle & commerciale or the French Catalogue des Brevets d'Invention we may only have access to the new number. When a French patent is included within Espacenet, it will be primarily searchable by way of the added number, though the principle number will be viewable on the original document itself.

In the cases of French patents, these “certs d’addition”, will be a key instance of our using the “Supplementary to patent” field. (There are other instances, in which a new registration isn't necessarily an addition to an earlier patent, per se, but still makes reference. References are also made to equivalent patents filed earlier in other nations. This usually refers to the internally significant priority date.)

The phrase “cert d’add” will occasionally be found within the patent's title, particularly within the antique catalogues.

Legally, and internationally, these documents are equal to patents, in that their filing dates are used as points of reference, both nationally and internationally. A later certificate of addition, or on occasion another patent altogether, may refer to one of these. A patent filed within some other nation may refer to one of these, usually by the filing date, treating it exactly as a patent. Technically, and semantically, within the French system, a "certificat d'addition" differs from a "brevet". This may be a matter of mere semantics, but it is to be noted when comparing analogous protocols internationally, or when noting the lack of said analogous protocols. Belgium, for instance, also uses the term "brevet", equalling "patent", as in the case of France, but rather than distinguishing between the "brevet" and any equivalent of the "certificat d'addition", as such and as technically another type of document, the Belgian system has two types of "brevet", one being the "invention", the other being the "perfectionnement". These "improvements" are invariably associated with preceding "inventions", but each "perfectionnement" will have its new number, a number falling logically relative to the numbers of the other patents filed in the surrounding days, weeks, and so forth. Thusly, these protocols are imperfectly analogous.

It may be that all nations we are studying have some means of treating later inventions which are considered as improvements to be associated with specific, and earlier, patents, filed within the same nation. France may or may not be unique in semantically treating the successor documents as another type of document.