What territory is surrendered?

Biotechnology Law Report

Volumn 21, Issue 6, 2002, Pages 551-557

  Warburg, Richard ^a   Whittaker, Michael ^a   Sobaje, Jason ^a  

^a FOLEY AND LARDNER LLP   (United States)

Author keywords

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Indexed keywords

EID: 77952629076     PISSN: 0730031X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1089/073003102761697936     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd., 234 F.3d 558, 569 (Fed. Cir. 2000) (en banc).
2. Thus, the Court stated that "after amendment, as before, language remains an imperfect fit for invention" and that a "narrowing amendment may demonstrate what the claim is not; but it may still fail to capture precisely what the claim is." Festo at 1841.
3. Named for Gordon Moore, Moore's Law predicts a doubling of transistor density, and hence a reduction in the size of each transistor, on a manufactured die every year.
4. See, e.g., Festo at 1842 ("The patentee must show that at the time of the amendment one skilled in the art could not reasonably be expected to have drafted a claim that would have literally encompassed the equivalent").
5. See, e.g., Festo at 1842 ("There are some cases, however, where the amendment cannot reasonably be viewed as surrendering a particular equivalent. The equivalent may have been unforeseeable at the time of the application").
6. Festo at 1841; emphasis added.
7. Festo at 1841-42.
8. This hypothetical example obviously ignores any analysis regarding whether such an equivalent was foreseeable, whether the rationale underlying the amendment bears more than a tangential relation to the equivalent in question, etc.
9. 234 F.3d at 575.
10. Festo at 1837-38.