The title of the invention is a combination of a maximum of 7-10 words that must clearly define the nature of the invention. Quite often, the title of the invention is the commercial name under which the product is planned to be sold. Unfortunately, there are a number of requirements for the title of a patent or utility model application, which the product's sales name usually does not meet.

Regulationstates that the title of the invention must clearly and precisely indicate the technical purpose of the invention and correspond to the essence of the invention. The title of the invention must not be narrower or broader than the essence of the invention. Quite often, the Patent Office expert also refers to this requirement regarding the title of the invention when conducting an examination. Let's take, for example, if you want to protect a water filter that contains a novel substance X for filtering water, then it would be logical to call the invention "Water filter containing substance X". Unfortunately, with such a title, we can nullify the protection of our invention. How?

Let's look at the theory. The content and scope of patent protection are determined by the wording of the patent claims. The first claim of a patent claim consists of a limiting and distinguishing part. The limiting part begins with the title of the invention. The limiting part lists those features of the invention that are known in the prior art, and the distinguishing part lists those features that are new.

If we now call our invention “a water filter containing substance X”, then the new substance that we want to protect in water filtration will be included in the list of known features in the prior art. Thus, the protectable feature will be included in the known features of substance X, i.e. in the limiting part of the claim. At the same time, the new features will be in the distinguishing part of the claim, which is located after the known features. But we will not write substance X there anymore, because that would be repetition.

In the instructional material(9.2 limiting part) this situation is described as follows: The limiting part defines the subject matter of the invention (the name of the subject matter of the invention is given) and those essential features of the invention that are common to one of the closest technical solutions known in the prior art. According to formal logic, the name of the subject matter of the invention is a gender characteristic of the invention as a concept, while the features that are common to one of the closest technical solutions known in the prior art are a species characteristic.

This is why we cannot name the invention so that it contains the feature we want to protect. In this example, we could call the invention, for example, “Water filter containing a filtering agent” or simply “Water filter”.