The concepts of indefiniteness and functional language have been entangled for a very long time. Indeed, it was this complicated interplay that lead to the eventual statutory inclusion of a "means-plus-function" section in the 1952 Patent Act. But, long before the middle of the twentieth century, the American patent system had grappled with issues related to functional claiming and balancing those issues against the public need to know the extent of a patent's reach. It is not known when the first modern means-plus-function claim was patented, but it is generally known that this claim format was commonly used in the nineteenth century. In this article, Finnegan attorney Eric P. Raciti discusses the history of means-plus-function claiming and its place in the patent system.
Previously published in Landslide
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