Judicial Capacities and Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard

Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review Volume 20 | Issue 2 2014 Judicial Capacities and Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard Greg Reilly Unviersity of Chicago Law School Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons, and the Judges Commons Recommended Citation Greg Reilly, Judicial Capacities and Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard, 20 Mich. Telecomm. & Tech. L. Rev. 243 (2014). Available at: http://repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr/vol20/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . JUDICIAL CAPACITIES AND PATENT CLAIM CONSTRUCTION: AN ORDINARY READER STANDARD Greg Reilly* Cite as: Greg Reilly, Judicial Capacities and Patent Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard, 20 MICH. TELECOMM. & TECH. L. REV. 243 (2014). This manuscript may be accessed online at repository.law.umich.edu. 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, costly, and error prone for generalist judges because they force the judge to step into the shoes of a scientist. It is time to abandon the legal fiction that claims should be construed from the perspective of a skilled person in the field—instead, judges should construe claims from the perspective of an ordinary reader discerning meaning from the context of the patent. The ordinary reader standard is more familiar to generalist judges, easier and cheaper to apply, and less error prone. Perhaps surprisingly, it is also consistent with the nature of claim construction. Rather than eliminate technical context, an ordinary reader standard focuses on the technical context that was provided by the patentee, is publicly available to everyone, and by definition reflects the skill level, field, and time of the invention. And, * Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Daniel Abebe, Douglas Baird, Anya Bernstein, Alex Boni-Saenz, Vince Buccola, Tony Casey, Roger Ford, Todd Henderson, Aziz Huq, Saul Levmore, Oskar Liivak, Jonathan Masur, Jennifer Nou, John Rappaport, Erin Reilly, David Schwartz, Victoria Schwartz, Lior Strahilevitz, and participants at the University of Chicago Law School Research Colloquium, 2013 Works in Progress in Intellectual Property (WIPIP) Conference at Seton Hall University School of Law, and the Third Annual Patent Conference (“PatCon3”) at the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law for helpful discussions and suggestions on this and earlier versions of the paper. In private practice, I participated in the following cases discussed or cited in this Article: Arlington Industries, Inc. v. Bridgeport Fittings Inc.; St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, Inc. v. Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co.; and St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, Inc. v. Canon, Inc. This Article relies exclusively on publicly-available information regarding these cases and reflects solely the personal views of the author. 243 244 Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review [Vol. 20:243 rather than ignore the audience for patent claims, it provides a common ground for the varied consumers of modern patent claims: skilled people, business people, patent examiners, lawyers, and judges. TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. PATENT CLAIM CONSTRUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. The Anatomy of a Patent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The Claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Patent Prosecution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Interpreting Patent Claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The Importance of Claim Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Claim Construction Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. THE FEDERAL CIRCUIT’S CLAIM CONSTRUCTION SPLIT . . . . . . A. A Division Over General or Specific Meaning . . . . . . . . . B. The Importance of General or Specific Meaning . . . . . . . C. The Missing Question of Generalist Judges . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Interpretive Choice and Judicial Capacities . . . . . . . . 2. Institutional Choice or Interpretive Choice? . . . . . . . . III. GENERALIST JUDGES AND GENERAL MEANING . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Generalist Judges and “Plain” Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The Difficulties of Determining General Meaning . . 2. Consequences of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Generalist Judges and the Phillips Approach . . . . . . . . . . IV. GENERALIST JUDGES, SPECIFIC MEANING, AND AN ORDINARY READER STANDARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Generalist Judges and the Focus on the Disclosed Invention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Problems with Disclosed Invention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Consequences of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Generalist Judges and the Ordinary Reader Standard . . 1. Simplifying Claim Construction: An Ordinary Reader Standard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Obstacles to an Ordinary Reader Standard . . . . . . . . . C. The Ordinary Reader Standard and Claim Construction Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Predictability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Proportionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 244 249 250 250 253 255 256 256 257 260 260 264 266 267 269 270 271 271 276 (...truncated)