Definition
A Register of Patents is an official public record book maintained by a patent authority in which granted patents and related documentation are recorded and made available for public inspection. The register serves as the authoritative index of patent rights in force, allowing the public to identify what inventions are protected, who holds the rights, and on what terms.
In its earliest English statutory form, the Register of Patents was established by the Patent Law Amendment Act 1852 (15 & 16 Vict. c. 83, § 34), which required that such a book be kept at the specification office for public use. This was a significant administrative reform: prior to 1852, the English patent system was notoriously fragmented and cumbersome, and the creation of a centralized register represented a move toward transparency and accessibility in intellectual property administration.
In modern practice, the concept survives and has expanded considerably. National patent offices — including the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) — maintain comprehensive patent registers or databases that record not only grants but also assignments, licenses, maintenance fee status, and legal proceedings affecting patent rights. What began as a simple book of patents is now a continuously updated electronic record system with global reach.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical patent law sources need to understand that the Register of Patents referenced in older English legal dictionaries is specifically a creature of mid-nineteenth-century statutory reform, not a common-law institution. Black's Law Dictionary's entry, drawn from Stephens' Commentaries, anchors the term squarely in the 1852 Act. Sources predating that statute will not use this phrase in the same administrative sense, and the register it describes was English, not American.
For American patent research, the equivalent institutional record is the USPTO's patent database, but the term "Register of Patents" does not carry the same statutory weight in U.S. law as it does in the English tradition. U.S. patent records have been maintained in various forms since the Patent Act of 1790, but American legal dictionaries and statutes more commonly reference the "patent rolls" or specific USPTO record-keeping requirements under 35 U.S.C. rather than a unified "Register of Patents" by that name.
A key research trap: do not conflate the Register of Patents with the trademark Principal Register. They are entirely separate records, governed by separate statutes, serving separate functions. The similarity of the word "register" in both contexts can mislead researchers moving between patent and trademark materials.
The secondary source Black's cites — Stephens' Commentaries on the Laws of England — is a reliable Victorian treatise, and its reference to the Register of Patents is consistent with the administrative history of English patent law. Researchers using Stephens' Commentaries should note that the relevant passage appears in the context of personal property and industrial rights, not constitutional or common-law doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the only historical dictionary entry in this corpus for the term, and its treatment is brief but accurate. The definition ties the Register directly to the 1852 statute and locates it at the specification office — the predecessor institution to what became the UK Patent Office. The citation to Stephens' Commentaries is appropriate; Stephens was a standard Victorian reference for English property and commercial law.
What the historical sources do not address is the functional significance of the register as a tool of public notice — the principle that registration creates constructive knowledge of patent rights. Modern patent law scholarship gives this notice function considerable weight, but mid-nineteenth-century dictionary treatment focuses on the administrative machinery rather than the legal consequences of registration. Researchers drawing solely on historical dictionaries will miss this dimension entirely.
Historical sources also do not reflect the register's eventual evolution into assignment and licensing recordation — functions that became critical as patent rights became commercially transferable assets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term "Register of Patents" in its classical statutory sense is English in origin. U.S. patent law does not use the phrase as a formal term of art, though the USPTO performs equivalent record-keeping functions. Researchers working in Commonwealth jurisdictions — particularly the UK, Australia, and Canada — will encounter the term and its statutory variants in patent administration materials; the specific procedural rules differ by jurisdiction.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
ip_5: Patent Law — Overview, History, and the Patent Act (35 USC), The Law Mind Intellectual Property Encyclopedia
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