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Article: Exclusion confusion? A defense of the Federal Circuit's specific exclusion jurisprudence.
- Article from:
- Michigan Law Review
- Article date:
- November 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Michigan Law Review Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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 ...