The Paris Convention - it was originally intended to overcome the
practical problems faced by patentees in securing patent
protection in a number of different countries - in the absence of a
priority period, a prospective patentee would have to co-ordinate
all applications to ensure that they are filed simultaneously,
otherwise there would be a risk that after the original application
had been filed in prospective patentee’s home state, later
applications in other states would be refused on the grounds that
they lacked novelty.
The solution in the Paris Convention was to treat the original
application as fixing the priority date for subsequent applications,
provided the subsequent applications were made within 6 months
of the original application (later extended to 12 months).
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