NL Patent Office

Requirements

In order to be eligible for a patent in the Netherlands, you must have devised a technical invention that complies with three material conditions.

• A technical invention is understood to mean a product or operating procedure in any technological field. The material conditions are:
  
  Novelty
  The product or process may not have been made public anywhere in the world before the date of submitting the patent application, not even through the activities of the inventor himself (e.g. by means of a company brochure or a presentation at a trade fair).
  
  
• Inventive step
  The invention may not be obvious to a professional.
  
  
• Industrial application
  The invention must relate to a technically demonstrable functioning product or production process.

Services, natural scientific theories, calculation methods, undeveloped ideas and aesthetic designs cannot be protected by patent. Other forms of protection can be used for these, such as copyright, design and model rights or trademark rights.

When assessing your application, these requirements relating to content do not play a role, because patents are not examined in the Netherlands (and are known as registration patents). This means that your patent is always granted. The content is only examined subsequently in court in the event that a dispute arises in relation to the granted patent.