Article 18: Matters excluded from patent protection
The following shall be excluded from patent protection even if they constitute inventions
under article 5 (7): of this Law;
1° discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
2° schemes, rules or methods for doing business, performing purely mental acts or playing
games;
3° methods for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or therapy, as well as
diagnostic methods practiced on the human or animal body; nevertheless, this provision
shall not apply to products for use in any of those methods;
4° substances, even if purified, synthesized or otherwise isolated from nature; nevertheless,
this provision shall not apply to the processes of isolating those substances from their
original environment;
5° known substances for which a new use has been discovered; this provision shall not apply
to the use itself, where it constitutes an invention under article 5(7) of this Law;
6° plants and animals, including their parts, other than micro-organisms, and essentially
biological processes for the production of plants or animals and their parts, other than
non-biological and microbiological processes and products obtained from those
processes;
7° animal and plant varieties;
8° pharmaceutical products, for the purposes of international conventions to which Rwanda
is party;
9° inventions whose commercial use is contrary to public order and to morality.
The provisions of paragraph one of this article shall not apply to the following inventions:
1° process inventions which, in whole or in part, consist of steps that are performed by a
computer and are directed by a computer program; and
2° product inventions consisting of elements of a computer-implemented invention,
including in particular:
a) machine-readable computer program code stored on a tangible medium such as a
floppy disk, or any kind of disks or computer memory; and
b) a general purpose computer whose novelty over the prior art arises primarily due to
its combination with a specific computer program.
The applicant who has filed patent applications for computer programs and computer-related
inventions listed in paragraph (2) of this article has waived from his right of seeking copyright
protection.