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Right to continue use begun before date of filing or priority.
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55.—(1) Where a patent is granted for an invention, a person who in the State before the date of filing of the patent application or, if priority was claimed, before the date of priority, does in good faith an act which would constitute an infringement of the patent if it were then in force, or makes in good faith effective and serious preparations to do such an act, shall have the rights specified in subsection (2).
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(2) The rights referred to in subsection (1) are the following:
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(a) the right to continue to do or, as the case may be, to do the act referred to in subsection (1),
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(b) if such act was done or preparations had been made to do it in the course of a business—
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(i) in the case of an individual—
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(I) the right to assign the right to do it or to transmit such right on death, or
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(II) the right to authorize the doing of the act by any of his partners for the time being in the business in the course of which the act was done or preparations had been made to do it;
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(ii) in the case of a body corporate, the right to assign the right to do it or to transmit such right on the body's dissolution;
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and the doing of that act by virtue of this subsection shall not amount to an infringement of the patent concerned.
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(3) The rights specified in subsection (2) shall not include the right to grant a licence to any person to do an act referred to in subsection (1)
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(4) Where a product which is the subject of a patent is disposed of by any person to another in exercise of a right conferred by subsection (2), that other and any person claiming through him shall be entitled to deal with the product in the same way as if it had been disposed of by a sole proprietor of the patent.
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