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Priority right.
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25.—(1) A person who has duly filed in or for the State, or in or for any other state party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, an application for a patent or for the registration of a utility model or for a utility certificate or for an inventor's certificate, or his successors in title, shall enjoy, for the purpose of filing a subsequent patent application under this Act in respect of the same invention, a right of priority during such period as may be prescribed, subject to compliance with any prescribed conditions and the payment of any prescribed fee.
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(2) Every filing that is equivalent to a regular national filing under the national law of the state where it was made (including the State), or under bilateral or multilateral agreements, shall be recognised as giving rise to a right of priority.
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(3) In this section “a regular national filing” means any filing that establishes the date on which the application was filed, whatever may be the outcome of the application.
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(4) (a) A subsequent application for the same subject-matter as a previous first application and filed in or in respect of the same state (including the State) shall be considered as the first application for the purposes of determining priority if, and only if, at the date of filing the subsequent application, the previous application has been withdrawn, abandoned or refused, without having been open to public inspection and without having left any rights outstanding, and has not served as a basis for claiming right of priority.
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(b) Where, pursuant to this subsection, a subsequent application is considered as a first application, the first application may not thereafter serve as a basis for claiming a right of priority.
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(5) If the first filing has been made in a state which is not a party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property subsections (1) to (4) shall apply if the Government makes an order to that effect under this subsection consequent upon bilateral or multilateral agreements under which the State grants on the basis of a first filing made in or for that state and subject to conditions equivalent to those laid down in the said convention, a right of priority having equivalent effect.
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