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Judicial Capacities And Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard, Greg Reilly
Judicial Capacities And Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard, Greg Reilly
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Patent claim construction is a mess. The Federal Circuit’s failure to provide adequate guidance has created significant problems for the patent system. The problems with claim construction result from the Federal Circuit’s inability to resolve whether claim terms should be given (1) the general, acontextual meaning they would have to a skilled person in the field; (2) the specific meaning they have in the context of the patent; or (3) some combination of the two. The claim construction debate largely overlooks the generalist judges who must implement claim construction. This Article fills that gap, concluding that existing approaches are difficult, …
Structure From Nothing And Claims For Free: Using A Whole-System View Of The Patent System To Improve Notice And Predictability For Software Patents, Holly K. Victorson
Structure From Nothing And Claims For Free: Using A Whole-System View Of The Patent System To Improve Notice And Predictability For Software Patents, Holly K. Victorson
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
No uniform or customary method of disclosure for software patents is currently employed by inventors. This Note examines the issues that develop from software patent claims disclosed at various levels of abstraction, and the difficulties encountered by courts and the public when investigating the contours of the software patent space. While the courts have placed some restrictions on the manner in which software inventions are claimed, they are easily bypassed by clever patent applicants who desire to claim the maximum scope of their inventions. In the long run, however, a large “patent thicket” of overlapping and potentially overbroad inventions will …