Summary

One of the cornerstones of legal protection of industrial property is the principle that legal protection can only be extended to those inventions that at the moment of application for protection are novel, i.e. to which an unspecified set of persons has not had access prior to the date of application. Legal protection is excluded for those inventions that have been made accessible to the general public. The circumstances under which such knowledge has been made accessible is not material.
The circumstances of real life require that legal regulation of industrial property should contain legal provisions that would ameliorate such drastic results. As a solution to this problem, the doctrine of the grace period (preferential treatment of novelties) has been incorporated in the industrial property law of many nations, among them Estonia. The article introduces us to the doctrine of preferential treatment and seeks to answer the question how to interpret the provisions in the patent law of Estonia that regulates the doctrine of grace period.