Legislative Implementation of Flexibilities - Burundi
| Title: | Article 18 of the Law No. 1/13 of 28/07/2009 on Industrial Property |
| Field of IP: | Patents |
| Type of flexibility: | Patentability or exclusion from patentability, of software-related inventions |
| Summary table: |  |
Provisions of Law
Article 17:
The following shall be excluded from patent protection:
- Discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
- Plans, principles or methods in the field of economic activities, in the performance of purely intellectual activities or in games;
- Methods of surgical or therapeutic treatment of the human or animal body as well as diagnostic methods. This provision shall not apply to the products used for the implementation of one of these methods;
-Natural substances, even if they had been purified, synthesized or isolated in another manner. This provision shall not apply to processes making it possible to isolate these natural substances from their original environment;
-Known substances for which a new use has been discovered;
-Plants and animals, including parts thereof, other than microorganisms, and essentially biological processes for the breeding of plants and animals and parts thereof, other than non-biological and microbiological processes;
-Animal breeds and plant varieties;
-Inventions whose exploitation is contrary to public order or morality, it being understood that the exploitation of said invention is not contrary to public order or morality owing to the sole fact that such exploitation is prohibited by legislation;
- Pharmaceutical products, up until January 1, 2016.
Article 18:
The provisions of Article 17 shall not apply:
- to process inventions which consist in full or in part of procedures which are carried out by a computer and run by a computer program;
- to product inventions consisting of elements of an invention implemented by computer, in particular, a machine-readable computer code stored on a material medium such as a diskette, a computer hard drive or a computer memory and a universal calculator, the novelty of which in relation to prior art primarily stems from its combination with a specific software.
It is understood that persons filing patent applications concerning computer programs and inventions relating to computers covered by paragraph 1 have waived their right to any copyright protection.