Novelty asks whether one earlier document already contains your invention. Inventive step asks whether a skilled person would have reached it anyway. The two fail for different reasons and are answered with different evidence. Nepal's own patent law names only the first of them.
Key takeaways
- Novelty is defeated by a single disclosure. Inventive step is defeated by an obvious combination of several.
- Nepal's Act asks only whether an invention is new and useful to the general public (Sec. 5).
- The words "inventive step", "obvious" and "prior art" do not appear in the Act's official English text.
- TRIPS Article 27(1) still requires patents for inventions that are new, inventive and industrially applicable.
- In a search report, an X citation attacks your claim alone and a Y citation only in combination.
- Nepal has recorded about 90 patents in total, so there is very little local doctrine to read.
- A Nepali patent runs seven years from registration and may be renewed twice.
What is novelty, in one sentence?
An invention is new if no single earlier disclosure already contains everything your claim asks for, arranged and working the way the claim says.
The test is strict and mechanical. One document, one public use, one sale — any of them can carry the whole claim.
It does not matter whether that earlier disclosure used your words, your product name, or even noticed what it was describing.
What is inventive step, in one sentence?
An invention involves an inventive step if a skilled person working in that field would not have arrived at it by an obvious route from what was already known.
Here the examiner may put two or three documents side by side. The question is whether joining them was an ordinary thing to do.
That makes it a judgement, not a comparison. Two examiners can honestly disagree about it, and often do.
Why do the two tests need different evidence?
Novelty is answered by a feature list. You take your claim apart, take the document apart, and see whether every element is present in the one place.
Inventive step is answered by a story. You name the problem, name the closest earlier solution, name the difference, and show what the difference achieves.
An applicant who answers a novelty objection with enthusiasm, or an obviousness objection with a table, is answering the wrong question.
Does Nepal's law actually use both words?
No. The Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act 1965 asks the Department of Industry (DoI) to investigate whether the invention "is a new invention or not, and whether it is useful to the general public or not" (Sec. 5).
That is two requirements: new, and useful. The Act's definition of a patent at Sec. 2(a) uses the same pair of ideas.
Search the official English text published by the Nepal Law Commission and you will not find "inventive step", "obvious" or "prior art" anywhere in it.
So does inventive step matter in Nepal at all?
Treat it as a real requirement even though the statute does not name it. Three things point that way.
First, Nepal has been a WTO member since 2004. TRIPS Article 27(1) obliges members to make patents available for inventions that are new, involve an inventive step, and are capable of industrial application.
Second, that article's own footnote lets a member read "inventive step" as non-obvious and "capable of industrial application" as useful. So Nepal's word "useful" maps to industrial applicability — it does not stand in for obviousness.
Third, Sec. 5 gives the DoI a wide investigation power and lets it take expert advice. A broad power is where an obviousness question would be asked, if it is asked.
Because it is not written down, confirm the position with the Department of Industry or an advocate before you rely on it.
Why is there so little Nepali guidance on this?
Because there are almost no Nepali patents. The Economic Survey 2082/83 records 90 patents in total, cumulative to Falgun 2082, against roughly 71,000 trademarks.
Ninety files across the whole history of the register is not enough to build a published body of doctrine on obviousness.
So there is no Nepali test to copy. Write the application so that a careful reader anywhere would be convinced. Our note on Nepal's patent statistics sets out the figures.
What counts as prior art?
Any technical information that was publicly available before your filing or priority date. Patents, articles, manuals, catalogues, conference talks, product sales, exhibitions and public web posts all count.
It does not have to be in Nepali, or published in Nepal, or ever read by anyone. Availability is the test, not circulation.
Your own disclosure counts too. Nepal is first-to-file, so a launch post can defeat the novelty of the very thing you then apply for.
See what can be patented in Nepal for the wider boundary of the subject matter.
Where does a WO number come from?
A number written like WO 2021/150745 is an international publication issued by WIPO under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. It is an application that has been published, not a granted patent anywhere.
Each one normally carries an international search report. That report lists the documents an examiner found, and grades each of them.
Those grades are where novelty and inventive step stop being theory. They are the examiner telling you which of the two tests your claims are failing.
How do you read the letters on a search report?
The letters follow WIPO Standard ST.14, so they mean the same thing in every report you will ever open.
| Letter | What it means | Which test is in trouble |
|---|---|---|
| X | The claim cannot be considered novel, or cannot be considered inventive, on this document alone | Novelty first, then inventive step |
| Y | The claim cannot be considered inventive when this document is combined with another | Inventive step only |
| A | General state of the art, not of particular relevance | Neither, on its own |
| P | Published after your priority date but before the filing date | Depends on your priority claim |
| T | A later document, cited to explain the principle behind the invention | Neither; it is context |
A report with only A citations is a good morning. A report opening with an X against claim 1 is a redraft.
What should you do with an X citation?
Read the cited document against your independent claim, element by element, and mark each element present or absent.
If one element is genuinely missing, say which one and where the document is silent. That is the whole of a novelty answer.
If every element is there, the claim is gone as written. Narrow it to something the document does not reach, or think again.
What should you do with a Y citation?
Y means no single document beats you, so the attack is on the combination. Argue about the joining, not the parts.
Ask whether the two documents come from the same field, whether either points towards the other, and whether combining them would have spoilt what each was for.
Then show your result. A combination that produces an effect neither document predicts is the strongest answer available to you.
How do you run the novelty check yourself?
Do it before you spend anything on drafting. The steps below take an afternoon and change what you file.
- Write the claim as a list. One line per feature, in plain words, with nothing decorative left in.
- Collect the search terms. Include the words your competitors would use, not only your own.
- Search patents and products. Our guide to patent searching from Nepal covers the free databases.
- Grade what you find. Mark each document X, Y or A yourself, using the definitions above.
- Attack your own strongest hit. Try to argue the examiner's side before an examiner has to.
- Record the date and the terms. A search you cannot describe later is a search you cannot rely on.
- Decide. File, redraft, or stop. All three are legitimate answers.
What makes an inventive-step argument credible?
A measurement. "More efficient" persuades nobody; a figure from a repeatable test, against a named earlier design, persuades most people.
Put the supporting data in the application at filing. A feature not disclosed at filing usually cannot be claimed at all.
Will a Nepali application get a search report?
Not in this form. Nepal is outside the Patent Cooperation Treaty, so there is no international search report and no receiving office here.
The DoI runs its own investigation under Sec. 5. It does not publish a graded citation list of the kind described above.
If you already hold a foreign search report, treat it as free examination. It shows what a trained searcher found before your Nepali application is even read.
A Paris Convention priority claim gives twelve months from a first foreign filing, and a foreign applicant files here through a local agent under a power of attorney. The routes are compared in our guide to filing patents abroad from Nepal.
What does the DoI actually do with the application?
It investigates under Sec. 5, then issues a registration certificate under Sec. 7 or refuses the application under Sec. 6.
The refusal grounds are narrow: already registered to another person, applicant not the inventor, harm to public health, morality or the national interest, or conflict with existing law.
Registered patents are then published in the Nepal Gazette under Sec. 7A, unless they must be kept secret in the national interest.
Anyone who inspects or copies a published patent may object within 35 days, and the DoI then inquires. That window is much shorter than the one that applies to trademarks.
The full sequence, with the documents each stage needs, is in our patent application process guide.
Why does the seven-year term surprise people?
Most readers have seen the figure of twenty years from filing, which is the international norm for a patent term.
Nepal is different. Sec. 8 gives seven years from the date of registration, and Sec. 23B allows renewal twice in further seven-year terms.
Plan the commercial life of the invention around that, and diarise the renewals. The free renewal calculator works out the dates, and our patent renewal guide explains the windows.
Are the two tests the same everywhere?
The vocabulary travels; the details do not. Grace periods and how obviousness is reasoned differ by country, so the same documents can win in one office and lose in another.
Patents and utility models also differ in how much inventiveness they demand.
Common mistakes
- Launching first. A demonstration, a sale or a post can destroy the novelty of your own invention.
- Reading X as fatal to everything. It is fatal to that claim as written, which is not the same thing.
- Arguing merit instead of difference. Commercial success is not an answer to an obviousness objection.
- Searching only in your own words. The document that defeats you will use somebody else's vocabulary.
- Confusing the rights. A name is a trademark question, and a shape may be an industrial design rather than a patent.
- Leaving the effect out of the specification. You cannot usually add the proof after filing.
A worked example
This is an illustration, not a real case. A Butwal workshop builds a pedal-driven maize sheller with a spring-loaded drum that adjusts to cob size.
The search turns up one old patent for a fixed-gap sheller, graded X, and a second for a spring tensioner used in a completely different machine, graded Y.
The X document has no adjusting mechanism at all, so novelty holds once the claim names the spring loading properly.
The Y attack is the real fight. The workshop answers it with test data showing far less grain damage across cob sizes — a result neither document suggests.
In short
Novelty is settled by one document and a feature list. Inventive step is settled by a combination and an argument. Work out which one a citation attacks before you write a word in reply.
In Nepal, the Act asks only whether the invention is new and useful, so do not expect a written obviousness test — but draft as though one will be applied.
Free calculators and search tools for the rest of the process are at our tools page, and our patent team handles drafting, filing and examination responses at the DoI.
People also search for
- How to register a patent in Nepal
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- A plain-English glossary of IP terms
- Your patent certificate, explained
Only the Department of Industry can decide whether an invention is registrable here. If you are holding a search report and cannot tell how much trouble you are in, send us the report and your claims.
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