Patent Clutter

• Author: Janet Freilich
• Position: Associate Professor, Fordham Law School
• Pages: 925-983

Patent Clutter Janet Freilich * ABSTRACT: Patent claims are supposed to clearly and succinctly describe the patented invention, and only the patented invention. This Article hypothesizes that a substantial amount of language in patent claims is in fact not about the core invention, which may contribute to well-documented problems with patent claims. I analyze the claims of 40,000 patents and applications, and document the proliferation of “clutter”—language in patent claims that is not about the invention. Although claims are supposed to be exclusively about the invention, clutter appears across industries and makes up approximately 25% of claim language. Patent clutter may contribute several major problems in patent law. Extensive clutter makes patent claims harder to search. Excessive language in patent claims may be the result of over-claiming—when patentees describe potential corollaries they do not possess—thereby making the patent so broad in scope as to be invalid. More generally, it strains the comprehensibility of patents and burdens the resources of patent examiners. After arguing that patent clutter may contribute to these various problems, this Article turns to reforms. Rejections based on prolix, lack of enablement, and lack of written description can be crafted to dispose of the worst offenders, and better algorithms and different litigation rules can allow the patent system to adapt (and even benefit from) the remaining uses of excess language. The Article additionally generates important theoretical insights. Claims are often thought of as entirely synonymous with the invention and all elements of the claim are thought to relate equally strongly to the invention. This Article suggests empirically that these assumptions do not hold in practice, and offers a framework for * Associate Professor, Fordham Law School. I thank Yonathan Arbel, Oren Bar-Gill, Colleen Chien, Nestor Davidson, Jesse Frumkin, John Goldberg, John Golden, Jennifer Gordon, Clare Huntington, Joseph Kupferman, Ethan Leib, Joshua Lerner, Oskar Liivak, Alan Marco, Michael Meurer, Kristen Osenga, Mark Patterson, Sarah Pihonak, Nicholson Price, Duane Rudolph, Rachel Sachs, Joshua Sarnoff, Steven Shavell, Holger Spamann, Henry Smith, Haris Tabakovic, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, Thomas Wollmann, Steven Worthington, and Dennis Yao. This Article has also greatly benefited from feedback from patent examiners and members of the Office of the Chief Economist at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and from participants at the New England Junior Scholars Workshop, PatCon 6, the 8th Annual Junior Scholars in Intellectual Property Workshop, the 2016 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, the 2017 Tri-State Intellectual Property Conference, and workshops at St. John’s Law School, Harvard Law School, and George Washington Law School. 926 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 103:925 restructuring conceptions of the relationship between claims and the invention. I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 927 II. PATENT CLAIMS ............................................................................ 931 A. U NDERSTANDING C LAIMS ........................................................ 931 B. C LAIMS AND P ATENT T HEORY ................................................. 933 C. T HE P RACTICE AND P OLICY OF C LAIMS .................................... 935 1. Disclosure ....................................................................... 935 2. Clarity ............................................................................. 936 3. Searchability .................................................................. 937 4. Examinability ................................................................. 938 III. EMPIRICAL STUDY.......................................................................... 939 A. M ETHODOLOGY ...................................................................... 939 1. Measuring Element Frequency .................................... 942 2. Additional Data ............................................................. 943 3. Synonyms ....................................................................... 945 B. R ESULTS ................................................................................. 945 1. Prevalence ...................................................................... 948 2. Industry .......................................................................... 951 3. Application Characteristics ........................................... 953 4. Examination Characteristics ......................................... 955 5. Patent and Claim Characteristics ................................. 957 i. Specification Length ................................................... 957 ii. Independent and Dependent Claims ........................... 958 iii. Value Indicators ........................................................ 958 iv. Time ......................................................................... 959 C. V ALIDATING THE M ETHODOLOGY ............................................ 959 IV. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS .................................................... 960 A. U NDERSTANDING C LUTTER ...................................................... 961 1. Signaling ........................................................................ 961 2. Insurance ....................................................................... 963 3. Wearing Out the Examiner .......................................... 964 B. T HE P ROBLEM WITH C LUTTER ................................................. 965 1. Disclosure ....................................................................... 966 2. Clarity ............................................................................. 968 3. Searchability .................................................................. 970 4. Examinability ................................................................. 971 C. C LUTTER AND P ATENT T HEORY ............................................... 971 1. A New Framework for Claim and Invention ............... 971 D. R EFORMING C LUTTER ............................................................. 973 2018] PATENT CLUTTER 927 1. Strategies for Removing Ancillary Language .............. 974 i. Prolix ........................................................................ 974 ii. Enablement and Written Description Red Flags ........... 974 2. Strategies for Adapting to Ancillary Language ........... 976 i. Better Searching ......................................................... 976 ii. Removal to the Specification ....................................... 977 E. A DDRESSING P OTENTIAL L IMITATIONS ..................................... 978 V. CONCLUSION ................................................................................ 980 I. INTRODUCTION Perhaps the most famous catchphrase in patent law is “the name of the game is the claim.” 1 If claims are the name of the patent game, then patent law has a fundamental problem: “it isn’t working.” 2 Claims are so “notoriously difficult to understand” 3 that their meaning “is hotly debated in virtually every patent case.” 4 Claims are criticized as vague, unreadable, excessively long, impossible to search, and dreadful to interpret. 5 These concerns are longstanding. For example, in 1916, Judge Learned Hand expressively remarked that claims can be “such a waste of abstract verbiage . . . . It takes the scholastic ingenuity of a St. Thomas with the patience of a yogi to decipher their meaning.” 6 Claim dysfunctionality has generated a copious amount of literature 7 in addition to policy proposals and changes at the highest level. 8 In recent years, the White House, 9 the Federal Trade Commission, 10 the Patent and Trademark Office, 11 and the Supreme Court 12 have all begun seeking 1. Apple Inc. v. Motorola, Inc., 757 F.3d 1286, 1298 (Fed. Cir. 2014) (citing In re Hiniker Co., 150 F.3d 1362, 1369 (Fed. Cir. 1998)). 2. Dan L. Burk & Mark A. Lemley, Fence Posts or Sign Posts? Rethinking Patent Claim Construction , 157 U. PA. L. REV. 1743, 1744 (2009). 3. Kristen Osenga, The Shape of Things to Come: What We Can Learn from Patent Claim Length , 28 SANTA CLARA COMPUTER & HIGH TECH. L.J. 617, 620 (2011). 4. Mark A. Lemley & Carl Shapiro, Probabilistic Patents , 19 J. ECON. PERSP. 75, 85 (2005). 5 . See JAMES BESSEN & MICHAEL J. MEURER, PATENT FAILURE: HOW JUDGES, BUREAUCRATS, AND LAWYERS PUT INNOVATORS AT RISK 10–11 (2008). 6. Victor Talking Mach. Co. v. Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 229 F. 999, 1001 (2d Cir. 1916). 7 . See infra Part III.C. 8 . See infra Part III.C. 9. Press Release, The White House: President Barack Obama, Fact Sheet: White House Task Force on High-Tech Patent Issues (June 4, 2013), https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/04/fact-sheet-white-house-task-force-high-tech-patent-issues. 10. FED. TRADE COMM’N, THE EVOLVING IP MARKETPLACE: THE OPERATION OF IP MARKETS 116–17 (2009) [hereinafter EVOLVING IP MARKETPLACE]. 11 . Glossary Initiative , U.S. PAT. & TRADEMARK OFF., http://www.uspto.gov/patent/initiatives/ glossary-initiative#heading-2 (last modified Apr. 3, 2016, 8:59 PM). 12. Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2120, 2129–30 (2014). 928 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 103:925 improvements to the clarity and quality of patent claims. Yet the problems with claims remain acute. This Article provides an empirical analysis of the claims of 40,000 patents and applications. The study demonstrates that patent claims are cluttered with vast amounts of language that have little to do with the invention. By law, claims are supposed to be succinct, one-sentence descriptions of the invention, 13 but in practice they are often not. Instead, claims can swell into pages-long (but still one-sentence) descriptions of the invention and a whole host of other topics. Claims are thought to be hard to read because they describe complex...