Patent Law, some random buzzwords

Patent law in the United States bestows statutory rights upon a person who "invents or discovers any new and useful process...." Parties who challenge a patent may do so by denying that the process is in fact "new."

This creates a lot of jargon. For today, I'll limit myself to throwing some of the legalese around, because I'm lazy. Lawyers often pursue a challenge by looking for "prior art," that is, publications that will establish that the process or device was already known before the filing.

Courts in the US interpret the novelty requirement so that a claim will fail if a single publication can be produced that has already described within its "four corners ... every element of the claimed invention." This is also known as "anticipation." The "four corners" requirement means that the party asserting anticipation cannot allege that it exists but only within the combination of two or more documents: somebody must have put it all together.

Anticipation need not be literal. For example, it may be that a particular patent calls for a "bronze" component in an invention, and the claimed anticipation refers to a "copper" component. If the particular metal is not germane to the utility of the invention, a court may well find that the "doctrine of equivalents" applies, that the prior art mentioning copper will be decisive against the novelty of the 'same' invention with bronze.

Walter Blenko Jr., an attorney who practices patent law with the firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, has written, "[F]inding a single piece of prior art which discloses the same invention as that claimed in a patent is not the most likely scenario. what is far more likely to occur is that the prior art will be something similar but not identical to the patented invention." This leads to some close calls.

I trust no one learned anything reading this.

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