특허청구범위 해석시 상세한 설명 등의 참조에 관한 고찰

According to Article 97 of Korean Patent Act, the ‘scope of protection conferred by a patented invention shall be determined by the subject matters described in the claims.’ Patent claims are the scope of rights that patent applicants request to be recognized as an exclusive right, subject inventions that the patent examiner decides whether the inventions have patentability, and standards that 3rd parties may decide whether their acts infringe patented rights. Thus, patent claims should be written clearly to be understood by a person skilled in the art. Writing claims objectively and clearly is extremely difficult because of the limit of literal expression. In addition, claim interpretation is critical issues to both patent applicants and interested parties. Therefore, interpretation of patent claims should be done in the way that it provides an appropriate technical scope of the invention and that it does not provide any unexpected damages to 3rd parties. In this background, this article tries to find the trend in claim interpretation of the Supreme Court, and examines how the Supreme Court has referred to detailed description of invention or drawings during last 3 years. This will provide us insights regarding whether and how detailed description of invention should be referred to in claim interpretation.