Patent in another country

弁護士

In addition to Steven's answer and given your location, I would suggest that you first file a patent application (national) in Nigeria rather than in India because Nigeria is the country of origin of your invention will then serve as priority of your PCT international application.

It will be important when the time comes to select the countries which interest you the most (148 countries are covered automatically in a PCT application and at the time of the inputs into regional and national phases, within 30 or 31 months from the priority of origin, you will have to decide whether to maintain or not the protection in any country).

Simply, you must know that the overall budget required for a "global" protection easily exceeds 22 523 NGN (US $ 112,810) after a few years (there are fees of local patent attornees, national taxes, answers to the objections of local patent Offices, annuities ...), knowing that a patent lasts 20 years in most countries ...

In the occurrence, given the technology and your strategy, I suggest you to validate your invention, at the end of the PCT procedure, not only in India, the host country, but – i you can - in Europe (EPO), North America, Australia, Japan, China and also Africa. You get indeed on the African continent the OAPI (African Intellectual Property Organization) procedure (mainly French-speaking Ouest countries) and ARIPO (African Regional Intellectual Property Organization) procedure (mainly English-speaking East countries), comparable to what we can do in Europe as they both allow touching a multitude of countries through a single filing.

Moreover, all OAPI states and practically all ARIPO states have ratified the Patent Cooperation Treaty ("PCT"), so:

- using the procedure OAPI (Bangui Agreement of March 2, 1977), you will be able to patent directly your mobile app in the following 17 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Central African Republic, Senegal, Chad and Togo.

- and using the procedure ARIPO (Lusaka Agreement of 9 December 1976 and the Harare Protocol of 10 December 1982), you will be able yo patent directly your invention in the following 19 countries: Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya (very interesting regarding your technology…), Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The 17 other African countries - including the island countries - remaining can only be referred "nationally" via your PCT (or directly if you don’t use PCT).

We have many local correspondents in all these countries (including one in Lagos, Europe and the rest of the world, working with us on the basis of special agreements and we can take in charge, supervise and coordinate your PCT and its followings from France.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want to continue this discussion and, possibly, that we intervene.

Sincerely yours,
Simon