Federal Act
on Patents for Inventions
(Patents Act, PatA)¹

¹ The date of fil­ing is the day on which the last of the fol­low­ing items are filed:

a.

an ex­press or im­plied ap­plic­a­tion for the grant of a pat­ent;

b.

in­form­a­tion al­low­ing the iden­tity of the pat­ent ap­plic­ant to be es­tab­lished;

c.

an item which ap­pears to be a de­scrip­tion.¹³⁰

² For pos­ted ap­plic­a­tions, the date of fil­ing is the day on which it was giv­en to the Swiss postal ser­vice for de­liv­ery to the IPI.¹³¹

³ The Fed­er­al Coun­cil shall reg­u­late the par­tic­u­lars, in par­tic­u­lar the lan­guage in which the items un­der para­graph 1 must be filed, the date of fil­ing and pub­lic­a­tion, wheth­er a miss­ing part of the de­scrip­tion or the draw­ing may be filed af­ter­wards, as well as the re­place­ment of the de­scrip­tion or the draw­ings with a ref­er­ence to a pat­ent ap­plic­a­tion filed earli­er¹³².