A single word decided the fate of an entire patent family. That's not a hypothetical — it's what happened when the Opposition and Appeal Division reviewed European patent EP1397304B1, where a term originally meaning "circular" in the source language was rendered as...
A single mismatched word buried on page fourteen of a patent specification can decide whether a company owns its own invention or hands the idea away for free. That sentence sounds dramatic, but patent examiners, litigators, and IP counsel around the world will tell...
Patent drafting rewards precision more than almost any other category of technical writing, and that precision doesn't survive automatically once a claim set crosses into a second language. Anyone who has compared a source patent against its foreign-filed counterpart...