804 No. 40 of 2016]
Act No. 15
of 2010
Cap. 400
Patents
“prior art” means knowledge which is publicly known and
used by others or is available, on the date of the invention,
to a person of ordinary skill in the art, and includes what
would be obvious from that knowledge;
“priority date” means the cut-off date stipulated in section
forty-one;
“process” includes a method, art, application or procedure
for producing, manufacturing, maintaining or improving the
quality of a product;
“protected patent” means a patent protected, as specified in
section fifteen;
“Receiving Office” means a national office or an intergovernmental organisation with which an international
application for a grant of a patent has been filed;
“Register” means the Register of Patents established and
maintained in accordance with section ten;
“Registrar” means the person appointed as Registrar under
the Patents and Companies Registration Agency Act, 2010;
“repealed Act” means the Patents Act, 1958;
“specification” means a provisional or complete description
of an invention or claim of an invention, as provided in
section thirty-one, and includes drawings;
“state of the art” means—
(a) all matter, whether a product, process or information
about anything, which has been made available or
disclosed to the public in Zambia in tangible form
or by written or oral disclosure or description, by
use or in any other way, prior to the lodging or
priority date of the application for the grant of a
patent;
(b) matter contained in an application for another patent
which was published or became open to public
inspection on or after the priority date of that
invention if —
(i) that matter was contained in that application
for that other patent as lodged, published or
opened to public inspection; and
(ii) the priority date of that matter is earlier than
that of the invention; or