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Reasonable Certainty & Corpus Linguistics: Judging Definiteness After Nautilus & Teva, Joseph S. Miller

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In Nautilus (2014), the Supreme Court held “that a patent is invalid for indefiniteness if its claims...fail to inform, with reasonable certainty, those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention.” We don’t require perfect clarity because, as Festo (2002) highlights, patentees can’t achieve it. We don’t launch a post hoc judicial salvage operation to rescue slipshod text because, as the functional-claiming cases from the 1930s and 1940s highlight, others can’t adequately plan around it. Reasonably certain notice, then, is just right: § 112 “require[s] that a patent’s claims, viewed in light of the specification and prosecution history, …