Any natural person or legal entity may file an application for a patent either alone or jointly with another.

The right to a patent shall belong to the inventor or his successor in title. Joint inventors shall, unless they agree otherwise, have equal rights and where the application for a patent is made by two or more persons jointly, a patent may be granted to them jointly.

Where two or more applications have been filed by different persons in respect of the same invention and the inventors concerned made the invention independently of each other, the right to a patent for that invention shall belong to the applicant whose application has the earliest filing date or, where priority is claimed, the earliest priority date, provided that his application has been published.