What types of intellectual property can be patented?
A patentable invention (used in the general sense) includes a process, a machine, an article of manufacture, or a composition of matter, and it must be new, useful, and unobvious to a person possessing “ordinary skill in the art” to which the invention relates. Usually the invention must have been reduced to practice, i.e.; an actual tangible “thing” must have been produced. In some instances, a constructive reduction to practice can be accomplished through the filing of a speculative patent application. Mental processes, theories, or ideas usually cannot be patented, and neither can discoveries of new laws of nature and naturally occurring articles. For example, a previously unknown non-manmade virus is not patentable, but a newly purified state of a known virus may be.
