종속항은 특허권에 어떠한 영향을 미치는가

Because the scope of protection of patented invention shall bedetermined by the claims, an applicant describes the subject matterconferred by a patent in the claims. For the purpose of the above, apatent applicant or owner describes a specification and claimsrespectively, and pays examination, registration, and reissue fees sameamount of independent and dependent claims. However, patent infringement is, basically, determined by allelements in the independent claim and the determination is primarilyestablished by comparing with the independent claim regardless ofdependent claims. According to the precedents, patent owner may addthe content of the specification to the claims using corrections if thesubject matter would be disclosed in the specification or drawing. Therefore, necessity of dependent claims will be reduced. Especially, inthe construction of the claims, dependent claims with an indefinitepurpose can make a limitation of a independent claim indefinite. These regulations of patent law and precedents may keep theapplicant feel that any dependent claim need not to be described as asubject matter in the claims and no dependent claim is necessary incurrent patent system. Therefore, considering necessity of thedependent claims from the long-term point of view, some regulations would be necessarily requested for dependent claims in an aspect ofprocedure considering if current patent system composed of independentand dependent claims could be held out. For example, the burden of apatent applicant or owner can be reduced by reducing the fees for thedependent claims, and it can be considered to limit the scope of thecorrection within the claims including the independent and dependentclaims.