Exclusion confusion? A defense of the Federal Circuit's specific exclusion jurisprudence.

Michigan Law Review, November, 2007 by Magic, Peter Curtis

Specific exclusion has become a controversial limitation on the doctrine of equivalents, which is itself an essential and controversial area of patent law. The doctrine of equivalents allows a patentee to successfully claim infringement against devices that are outside of the literal reach of the language used by the patentee in her patent to describe what she claims as her invention. The Supreme Court has prescribed some of the outer limits of the doctrine of equivalents and articulated the underlying policy concerns that inform its analysis--noting that courts should balance protection of the patentee's intellectual property with the public's reasonable expectations of the bounds of the patent--but has entrusted most of the doctrine's development to the Federal...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.