Court Opinion

ID: 9488489
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:47:11.65358+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:55.498672
License: Public Domain

PLAGER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join in the reversal of the trial court’s judgment of infringement, based on what I consider to be the correct claim interpretation as advanced by Judge Clevenger, and the consequences that flow therefrom.
There is testimony in the record that indicates that it is not known exactly how the chemical complexing, described in the opin*1563ion, actually works. If this is so, then Exxon’s burden, to prove that the chemical ingredients exist at some point in the accused composition in the claimed proportions, may be impossible of accomplishment. That could be said to argue in favor of an alternative construction of the claims, that what was meant was a process or product-by-process claim.
The difficulty with that argument is that the claims, as the opinion well demonstrates, are unquestionably composition of matter claims. In retrospect, it would appear that Exxon wishes it had product-by-process claims, and thus a “recipe.” But we are not free to read the claims as they might have been drafted, even if as drafted they do not accomplish what the inventor may have intended.
Claim drafting is itself an art, an art on which the entire patent system today depends. The language through which claims are expressed is not a nose of wax to be pushed and shoved into a form that pleases and that produces a particular result a court may desire. The public generally, and in particular, the patentee’s competitors, are entitled to clear and specific notice of what the inventor claims as his invention. That is not an easy assignment for those who draft claims, but the law requires it, and our duty demands that we enforce the requirement. There is no room in patent claim interpretation for the equivalent of the cy pres doctrine; that would leave the claiming process too indefinite to serve the purposes which lie at the heart of the patent system.