804 No. 40 of 2016] Act No. 15 of 2010 Cap. 400 Patents “prior art” means knowledge which is publicly known and used by others or is available, on the date of the invention, to a person of ordinary skill in the art, and includes what would be obvious from that knowledge; “priority date” means the cut-off date stipulated in section forty-one; “process” includes a method, art, application or procedure for producing, manufacturing, maintaining or improving the quality of a product; “protected patent” means a patent protected, as specified in section fifteen; “Receiving Office” means a national office or an intergovernmental organisation with which an international application for a grant of a patent has been filed; “Register” means the Register of Patents established and maintained in accordance with section ten; “Registrar” means the person appointed as Registrar under the Patents and Companies Registration Agency Act, 2010; “repealed Act” means the Patents Act, 1958; “specification” means a provisional or complete description of an invention or claim of an invention, as provided in section thirty-one, and includes drawings; “state of the art” means— (a) all matter, whether a product, process or information about anything, which has been made available or disclosed to the public in Zambia in tangible form or by written or oral disclosure or description, by use or in any other way, prior to the lodging or priority date of the application for the grant of a patent; (b) matter contained in an application for another patent which was published or became open to public inspection on or after the priority date of that invention if — (i) that matter was contained in that application for that other patent as lodged, published or opened to public inspection; and (ii) the priority date of that matter is earlier than that of the invention; or