Quality

Question 3

3.1
What is a good quality patent?

3.2
Is a patent that is of good quality in one country also of good quality in another country by default?

3.3
What should be the characteristics of a good quality patent universally - "base good quality"?

3.4
What are some of the jurisdiction specific characteristics that would make a patent less or more valuable in your jurisdiction?


Answer 3

3.1
A quality of a patent can be measured qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative measures comprises 3 parts:
(i) Satisfy the legislations of a country/jurisdiction in the aspect of patentability, novelty, inventiveness, and enablement of the invention.
(ii) validity and scope of the claims.
(iii) commercial viability of the claimed invention.

The quantitative measures comprises 2 parts:
(i) citations by other applications/patents as prior art.
(ii) the measure of proportion of a patent being high-impact, i.e. in the top 5% of most highly cited patents.

3.2
No, as the measure of quality is dependent on the legislations of a country/jurisdiction and the scope of the claims of the granted patents in a particular country/jurisdiction.

3.3
A good quality patent is a patent, which has the broadest possible coverage possible without attracting invalidity.

3.4
In Malaysia, due to the fact that patent application can be filed and enforced in English without the need for translation (reducing translation errors), due to its large and growing population and due to the effective mechanism for enforcement of patents with the establishment of the IP Courts, the patents filed in Malaysia can be considered to be more valuable as compared to other countries.