Exclusion Confusion? A Defense of the Federal Circuit\u27s Specific Exclusion Jurisprudence

Specific exclusion has become a controversial limitation on the doctrine of equivalents, which is itself an essential and controversial area of patent law. The doctrine of equivalents allows a patentee to successfully claim infringement against devices that are outside of the literal reach of the language used by the patentee in her patent to describe what she claims as her invention. The Supreme Court has prescribed some of the outer limits of the doctrine of equivalents and articulated the underlying policy concerns that inform its analysis-noting that courts should balance protection of the patentee\u27s intellectual property with the public\u27s reasonable expectations of the bounds of the patent-but has entrusted most of the doctrine\u27s development to the Federal Circuit. Critics argue that the Federal Circuit has applied specific exclusion, which precludes the doctrine of equivalents from reaching subject matter that is specifically excluded by the language used in the patent to describe the invention, in a way that does not adhere to the Supreme Court\u27s guidance on the doctrine of equivalents. The critics assert that the Federal Circuit has unduly narrowed the doctrine of equivalents by applying specific exclusion too aggressively. This Note demonstrates that the critics\u27 extreme characterization of Federal Circuit specific exclusion case law is unwarranted. The Federal Circuit has consistently and conscientiously applied specific exclusion, and their decisions conform to the Supreme Court\u27s guidance on the public notice function of patent claims. At the same time, the Federal Circuit has protected patentees by not allowing specific exclusion to reduce the doctrine of equivalents to another test for literal infringement

Beyond and with the object: assessing the dissemination range of lantern slides and their imagery

This article proposes methods to trace media history through material objects that build on archival practices. It discusses the character of information derived from the object and other related sources, to outline possibilities for media-historical research connecting multiple collections to create large sets of data. The aim of this article is twofold: first, I share practical knowledge about identifying lantern slides of commercially distributed slide sets, to generalize an understanding of identification and evaluation from both an archival and a scholarly perspective. Combined documentation of information from various sources (catalogues, lantern slides, trade press, lecture material, readings, related media) is often necessary to correctly identify lantern slides. Second, I propose criteria for research infrastructures to incorporate data documentation towards comparative research designs. The enormous dispersion of lantern slides over many collections leads scholars to build their own corpora from objects held in various collections, which can be ameliorated with standardised descriptors across collections. Further, new research questions tracing synchronic and diachronic dispersion could be asked with the collaborative documentation of a larger set of data, for example, assessing the geographic distribution and popularity of slide sets, reconstructing trade networks or the migration of images across various media forms. Altogether, collaborative documentation and search could lead to knowledge about the formation of canons of shared visual knowledge. Research into the dissemination of slide sets and the popularity of displayed motifs cannot be restricted to either ‘distant readings’ or ‘close readings’ exclusively, and benefits from the ability to switch between close inspections of the object as well as networked sources