Archaic form of letters patent. [(law) A type of legal document in the form of an open letter issued by an authority to direct that some action be taken; to grant a monopoly, right, status, or title to a person or organization; to record a contract.]

Legal protection for new inventions.

a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (c. 48), also known as the CDPA, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received royal assent on 15 November 1988.

The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust), founded in December 1908 and effectively terminated in 1915 after it lost a federal antitrust suit, was a trust of all the major US film companies and local foreign-branches (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig Polyscope, Lubin Manufacturing, Kalem Company, Star Film Paris, American Pathé), the leading film distributor (George Kleine) and the biggest supplier of raw film stock, Eastman Kodak.

a database containing patent applications and grants from 44 of the world's patent issuing authorities.