On 27 November 1963, in Strasbourg, the member States of the Council of Europe opened for signature the Convention on the Unification of Certain Points of Substantive Law on Patents for Invention (ETS No. 47). English and French, equally authentic. A single copy, deposited in the archives of the Council of Europe. Depositary: the Secretary General. Article 9: it enters into force three months after the deposit of the eighth instrument of ratification or acceptance. Entry into force: 1 August 1980. Indefinite duration. Article 13: denunciation takes effect six months after receipt. It is not the 1973 European Patent Convention, which sets up a separate system for granting patents.

The preamble: the unification of certain points of substantive patent law is likely to assist industry and inventors, to promote technical progress and to contribute to the creation of an international patent. It refers to Article 15 of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, as revised at Lisbon on 31 October 1958.

Article 1: in the Contracting States, patents shall be granted for any inventions which are susceptible of industrial application, which are new and which involve an inventive step. An invention which does not comply with those conditions shall not be the subject of a valid patent; a patent declared invalid on that ground shall be considered invalid ab initio. Article 2: the Contracting States shall not be bound to provide for patents in respect of inventions whose publication or exploitation would be contrary to ordre public or morality (exploitation is not so contrary merely because it is prohibited by a law or regulation), or in respect of plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals; that last provision does not apply to microbiological processes and the products thereof. Article 3: industrial application includes agriculture.

Article 4: novelty against the state of the art; everything made available to the public by written or oral description, by use, or in any other way, before the date of the application or of a validly claimed priority. A State may treat the contents of later-published national applications or patents as comprised in the state of the art to the extent that they have an earlier priority date. A six-month grace period for an evident abuse or for display at official international exhibitions within the terms of the Paris Convention of 22 November 1928. Article 5: an inventive step if the invention is not obvious having regard to the state of the art. Article 8: a description sufficiently clear and complete for a person skilled in the art; the extent of protection is determined by the terms of the claims, interpreted with the description and drawings.

Article 10: after entry into force, the Committee of Ministers may invite any member of the Paris Union which is not a member of the Council of Europe to accede. Article 12: a temporary reservation of ten years not to grant patents for food and pharmaceutical products as such and for certain agricultural or horticultural processes, and of five years for a wider disclosure grace; to be withdrawn as soon as circumstances permit. The parties are not listed here.

Palais du Rhin, Strasbourg. The city of signature, not the signing hall. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

For context: Convention on the Unification of Certain Points of Substantive Law on Patents for Invention. The text: UNTS, Convention on the unification of certain points of substantive law on patents.