Tuning Claims From Oil Wells to Truck Axles
2 min read [ad_1]


by Dennis Crouch
I have composed a selection of situations about the Supreme Court’s aged conclusion in Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. v. Walker, 329 U.S. 1 (1946). Walker’s patent claimed a “means . . . for tuning” a sound filter to a particular vibration frequency whilst searching for an oil-very well blockage. The Supreme Court located the declare problematic mainly because it did not claim the physical features of the invention’s point-of-novelty, but instead that tuning ingredient was claimed as a implies for carrying out its purpose. The final decision noted that some of the patent’s claims did consist of bodily aspects of the tuning system, but these claims had not been asserted in the situation.
The specific keeping in Halliburton was that Walker’s patent claim was invalid as indefinite for the reason that it used means-in addition-purpose claim language at the level of novelty. Halliburton was overturned by the Patent Act of 1952 with development of a statutory appropriate to incorporate indicates-plus-operate components in combination promises. 35 USC 112(f). I ponder even though whether underneath the new legislation, the Supreme Court docket might have uncovered an choice mechanism for invalidating the claim, this kind of as whole-scope enablement, comprehensive-scope prepared description, or ineligible subject matter issue.
I attract focus to Halliburton mainly because of its similarity to the patent in American Axle. The AmAxle patent claims a strategy of producing a push-shaft, with the clear level-of-novelty getting “tuning [a] liner to attenuate at the very least two types of vibration.” US7774911. While this claim is possibly not solely practical, the Supreme Court has also chastised partly-useful professing:
But the vice of a useful assert exists not only when a assert is ‘wholly’ purposeful, if that is at any time accurate, but also when the inventor is painstaking when he recites what has previously been viewed, and then takes advantage of conveniently functional language at the specific issue of novelty.
Gen. Electrical Co. v. Wabash Appliance Corp., 304 U.S. 364 (1938).
If the court finishes up granting certiorari in American Axle, I expect these parallels will see even more progress.



[ad_2]
Supply backlink
