Patent Law

The USPTO has cancelled 37 C.F.R. § 41.200(b). That rule required the BPAI to give claims their "broadest reasonable construction in light of the specification of the patent or application in which it appears" but applied only to interference proceedings.

In interferences, one party typically copies claims from the opposition's application/patent in order to provoke an interference. The copy is then interpreted to have the same claim scope as the original. In Agilent Technologies, Inc. v. Affymetrix, Inc., 567 F.3d 1366 (Fed. Cir. 2009), the Federal Circuit held that Rule 41.200(b) was contrary to this rule of interpretation ? thus, the rule was already dead from a legal standpoint.

75 FR 19558