The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court established in 1982 to handle appeals of Patent and other federal level litigation, has made a ruling which weakens the claims a patent holder can make against rivals. This has to do with the Doctrine of Equivalents, which says that a patent holder can claim incremental improvements/changes are covered by the patent. This is a change from the view [see Edmund Kitch] that patents are like gold claims that allow a patent holder to claim a space, rather than a point. The majority in the ruling say that the size of the claim must be reduced in order to allow innovation (a point which I would agree with, especially for the case of software patents where there’s many ways to do the same thing.) The minority holds the more proprietarian view that the patent must be defined broadly to encourage invention and filing.
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