The Court will construe claims so as to give a different meaning to different claims, otherwise some will not be effective. Lord Esher MR said: ‘I have always thought that the value of the expert evidence in such cases as this is, that they can point out to you things which you yourself would not, perhaps, without them, observe in two machines. They point out to you things that you must consider, but as to what their opinion is – whether they consider that the one is an infringement of the other, or whether they consider that the one is bad for want of novelty – I have always thought that is going beyond what they have any right to do, and that their opinion upon that is entirely subservient to the view of the the tribunal which is trying the case. If you are trying a case before a jury, the proper way to warn the jury against scientific discussions, and scientific opinions, and the pictures which scientific men draw, which are just their opinions and nothing else, is to say: ‘Look at them, as far as they are of assistance to ‘ you to point out to you the thing which you are to consider, and when you have got that in your minds, just throw your experts over and exercise your own knowledge and sense about it, and decide the matter for yourselves”.
Lord Davey observed: ‘if the language of a claim be ambiguous, and if it be fairly capable of two constructions, the court would be disposed to adopt that construction which would uphold the patent, and not that which would render it invalid.’
Lord Esher MR, Lord Davey
(1894) 11 RPC 403
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Warner-Lambert Company Llc v Generics (UK) Ltd (T/A Mylan) and Another SC 14-Nov-2018
These proceedings raise, for the first time in the courts of the United Kingdom, the question how the concepts of sufficiency and infringement are to be applied to a patent relating to a specified medical use of a known pharmaceutical compound. Four . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 18 October 2021; Ref: scu.668614
