Festo Corp. v Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co.
Supreme Court of the United States Official seal of the Supreme Court of the United States File links The following pages link to this file: Marbury v. ...
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Full case name: --- Citations: 535 U.S. 722 Prior history: --- Subsequent history: ---
Holding
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Festo Corp. v Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., 535 U.S. 722 (2002) was a United States Supreme Court decision in the area of patent law that examined the relationship between the doctrine of equivalents (which holds that a patent can be infringed by something that is not an exact copy only because some insubstantial element has been substituted) and the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel (which holds that a party who makes a change to a patent application to accommodate the requirements of patent law cannot claim an indirect infringement of an element that was narrowed by that change). Court citation is a standard system used in common law countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada to uniquely identify the location of past court cases in special series of books called reporters. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C., (large image) The Supreme Court of the United States, located in Washington, D.C., is the highest court (see supreme court) in the United States; that is, it has ultimate judicial authority within the United States... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or substance (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and useful. ... The doctrine of equivalents is a legal rule in most of the worlds patent systems that allows a court to hold a party liable for patent infringement even though the infringing device or process does not fall within the literal scope of a patent claim, but nevertheless is equivalent... In law, a patent infringement occurs when the subject-matter claimed in a patent has been utilized by someone other than the rightholder, without the owners approval or in disagreement with the terms of use given by the owner. ... Prosecution history estoppel, also known as file-wrapper estoppel, is a term used in United States patent law to indicate that a person who has filed a patent application, and then makes amendments to the application to accommodate the patent law, has no cause of action for infringement to the... A patent application is a request filed before a patent office in which an applicant applies for a patent for an invention. ...

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had ruled that any amendment to the patent application would create an absolute bar to a charge of infringement that did not allege a direct violation of that claim. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that such amendments do not create an absolute bar, but instead must be examined in light of the reason for the change. If the change was made to clarify a translation, for example, the inventor should suffer no reduction in rights. But if the change was made to keep the patent from overlapping with another patent, then the patent applicant will be presumed to have given up the right to complain about anything broader than the patent claim itself. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, or simply the Federal Circuit was founded in 1982 to combine similar federal cases to a specialized appellate court. ... Patent claims define the extent of the protection conferred by a patent, in technical terms. ...