My wife, Kristen Osenga, is a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. She writes in the area of patent law and has recently written a paper about a different way to look at claim construction using linguistics. She concludes that claim construction would be improved if there were more cooperation between the inventor and the Patent Office and provides some suggestions to increase cooperation. Here is a link to the paper and the abstract:
Conversation is easy. We communicate with other people every day without giving conscious thought as to how we understand the information exchanged in the course of the conversation. Patents, by contrast, are hard. Understanding information conveyed by a patent is difficult, despite deliberate and conscious efforts to shape or improve the process. Scholars have not yet seen the connection between the two concepts. We have not viewed patents as conversation – but perhaps we should. Viewing patents as conversations allows us to tap into a rich body of scholarship from the pragmatics branch of linguistics – the study of language and how we understand it – and turn traditional wisdom about interpretation of patents on its head. Understanding patents can be as easy as having a conversation. What needs to change is not the interpretation process, but rather the conversation itself. The key difference between everyday conversation and patents is the lack of cooperation in patent prosecution, the conversations that give rise to patents. If we can create a greater air of cooperation in the patent acquisition process, then we can rely on linguistics to help understand what is being conveyed. We can make interpretation of patents much more like understanding everyday conversation – easy.
Feel free to leave me any comments you might have or e-mail her. Also, the paper represents her personal thoughts and opinions and does not represent my views nor those of my clients or my law firm.
