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by nzentzis
1513 days ago
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Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for determining which words should be interpreted normally and which are landmines. The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly different (more specific, broader, or even completely disconnected) meanings than what you'd expect in normal writing or speech. Without knowing what those are, the safe approach is to ascribe the least favorable possible meaning to every word. "Does language X mean Y" becomes "could language X possibly be interpreted by someone who doesn't understand the material to kinda vaguely reference Y," and you get the type of broad assumptions you're lamenting here. |
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Also: A lot of the legalese I encountered as a patent examiner was "lexicographic definitions", that is, where a patent applicant writes somewhere in the patent specifications that a certain term or phrase has a particular meaning. Applicants didn't always make those easy to find... I recall one where (as I recall) they defined "insulation" to including something that can cool something down, which strikes me as simply wrong and confusing. That definition was basically hidden right in the middle of the patent application. It was necessary to find that definition to understand the claims. If the term is something I hadn't seen before then I would have just search for it, but for something common in the field I examined like "insulation", I wouldn't normally search for that. This is really annoying and unfortunately okay under USPTO rules.