US jurisdiction report: The valuable Patent Cooperation Treaty
By Paul J. Sutton, adjunct professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU Tandon.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if an inventor could with a single international filing simultaneously seek protection for an invention in most countries of the world? In fact there is such a procedure under what is called the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Concluded in 1970 and effective January 24, 1978, the PCT is an international patent law treaty that provides a unified procedure for filing patent applications that protect inventions in more than 150 contracting states.
