Specification and Drawings of Patent Application : It is a general requirement of a patent application that all terms and phrases used in the claims must find “clear support or antecedent basis in the description so that the meaning of the terms in the claims may be ascertainable by reference to the description.”
Specification and Drawings of Patent Application
It is important that the patent application have clear and unambiguous support in the detailed description for all words and phrases in the claim, so that anyone can understand how the claim reads on the description. Also, all structures described in the claim must be illustrated in the drawing. Further, it is preferred that each element described in the claim must be properly labelled in at least one of the drawings to provide proper support.
As may be understood that if a claim element does not have any support in the specification or at least in the prosecution history, the claim may not properly help a person of ordinary skill in the art to the requirement of the patent application. Therefore, it is required that the claims must clearly “read on” the specification. Further, it is required that the claims must use consistent terminology and further the same terminology is used in the description section, so that no ambiguities are present in the patent application. Without that, a claim may fail the written description requirements and be invalidated as indefinite.
In other words, when the claims, specification, and drawings do not correspond, the claims can be rejected. The claims should therefore be consistent with the disclosure. It may be contemplated that this requirement helps a person to be able to understand what the claim means, and how it is related to the example described in the detailed description. If this requirement is not followed, the claim will be rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 112 of the statute as “indefinite” or “vague and indefinite.” Generally, the best practice is to use the identical words of the claim somewhere in the body of the specification to ensure this requirement is met.
