DEFINITENESS AND PARTICULARITY IN PATENT CLAIMS

Authors

William Redin Woodward, member of New York and Massachusetts Bars

Abstract

To the uninitiated the professional jargon of patents, and particularly of patent claims, is somewhat mystifying even in the most ordinary cases. The profession likes to define the elements of apparatus as "means" for this, "means" for that and "means" for the other. Words like "plurality," "predetermined" and "comminuted" find remarkably frequent use by patent attorneys. And the habit of using out-of-the-way verbiage may lead the practitioner by force of habit to pass over a simple term like "sleeping car" in favor of a more elaborate phrase like "a communal vehicle for the dormitory accommodation of nocturnal viators." But it does not follow that such literary monstrosities appearing in the definition of the scope of a patent are an imposition on the public or an invasion of the statutory requirement that the inventor "shall particularly point out and distinctly claim the part, improvement, or combination which he claims as his invention or discovery."

Recommended Citation

William R. Woodward, DEFINITENESS AND PARTICULARITY IN PATENT CLAIMS, 46 Mich. L. Rev. 755 (1948).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol46/iss6/3