Aim of this article is to make readers understand important terms such as originality, invention and innovation and the subtle differences among them.
A person, very passionate about inventing solutions to problems in society once came to meet me. He said that he had invented something fantastic which was the best answer to many health and hygiene related social issues. He was insistently explaining that it was for the first time somebody had come up with such a solution. He added that after multiple searches through the internet he found out that there was not even a single attempt to make such a product in the past. I realized that he was trying to tell me that he had developed a novel product. Searching through the internet, I could easily sense that it was something that we (as IPR lawyers) would have found already existing after doing a detailed “prior art search”, and then we would be in a position to tell him that he had ‘invented’ something which was pre-existing and well known in the world.