Patent Act. Country/Territory Germany Document type Legislation Date 1936 (2017) Source FAO, FAOLEX Original source Bundesgesetzblatt, Part I, No. 1, 3 January 1981, pp. 1-24. Subject Agricultural & rural development, Livestock, Food & nutrition, Cultivated plants Keyword Intellectual property rights/patents Institution Legal proceedings/administrative proceedings Court/tribunal Dispute settlement Geographical area Alps, Europe, Europe and Central Asia, European Union Countries, North Sea, North-East Atlantic, Western Europe Abstract Article 1 of the above-mentioned Act establishes that patents shall be granted for inventions in any technical field if they are novel, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application. Patents shall be granted for inventions even if the subject matter concerns a product consisting of or containing biological material or a process by means of which biological material is produced, processed or used. Biological material that has been isolated from its natural environment or produced by means of a technical process may be the subject matter of an invention even if it had previously occurred in nature. The text consists of 147 articles divided into 12 Parts as follows: The Patent (1); The Patent Office (2); Proceedings before the Patent Office (3); The Patent Court (4); Proceedings before the Patent Court (5); Proceedings before the Federal Court of Justice (6); Common provisions (7); Legal aid (8); Infringements (9); Patent litigation proceedings (10); Allegation of entitlement to a patent (11); Transitional provisions (12). Full text German Website www.bmj.de; www.bgbl.de