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Broadest reasonable interpretation must be reasonable(08/23/10)
A recent decision by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, Ex parte Givens, should help applicants in dealing with rejections based on the examiner’s interpretation of the claims of an application.
Patent examiners are allowed to give the claims of a patent application the “broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification” in deciding whether those claims are anticipated or made obvious by the prior art. The explanation for this policy is that the applicant has the opportunity to amend the claims during prosecution and broad interpretation by the examiner reduces the possibility that the claim, once issued, will be interpreted more broadly than is justified. Applicants will be familiar with how freely examiners apply this policy. Examiners are not free, however, to ignore the specification of the application when it gives meaning to the limitation.
The Board in Ex parte Givens found that the specification of the Givens application gave a meaning to the claim term “sub-band spectral subtractive routine” that clearly distinguished it from the LMS adaptive noise canceller that includes a sub-band spectral subtraction routine of the Lin reference.
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