On The Determination Of The Scope Of The Claims In The Patent Infringement Case

The purpose of patents is to protect the exclusive rights of inventors. In patent invalid and patent infringement examination, how to determine the protection scope of the claims is an important problem. This work relates to the problems in the areas of law and industrial technology, is recognized as a difficult judicial problem. There are three determining mode:around the principle of limited, central limit principle and compromise. The Article59of the Patent Law of the People's Republic of China provides:the extent of protection of the patent right for invention or utility model shall be determined by the terms of the claims, the description and the appended drawings may be used to interpret the claims. Easy to see, for determining the protection scope of the patent rights, we reference the European Patent Convention and Compromise the principle of around limit and central limit. The interpretation of patent claims explain the words of them at first:it means reading the words of the patent claim directly, referring internal evidence such as the patent specification, the attached graph and other reviewed files, determining the true meaning of its words of the patent claim, defining the scope of the technology, and external evidence such as expert witness, dictionaries and science and technology academic articles can drawn on when the meaning of the words is still not clearly. Patent infringement does not come into existence when internal interpretation is used, in order to protect the patentee reasonably, equivalent interpretation should be user. The time of infringing patent rights is the time standard of judging infringe, the technical elements of infringement object are compared with ones of the patent claims one to one, form the vision of the general technical staff, whether the technical elements of infringement object and the patent claims achieve the same functionality, achieve the same function basically through the same way, and the intention of infringers is not considered. In order to obtain the patent rights when the patent is applied, however, abandoned technical elements will be used to interpret equivalently, the infringement will be not come into existence if charged object is the same as or more nearly with a common technology.