The Massachusetts Institute Of Technology v. Abacus Software

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• looking to dictionary definitions at the time the patent application was filed
• “The generic terms ‘mechanism,’ ‘means,’ ‘element,’ and ‘device,’ typically do not connote sufficiently definite structure.”
• “Although the single disclosed scanner in the specification includes this limitation, we do not confine the claim to the disclosed embodiments.”
• “[T]he patentee used ‘mechanism’ and ‘means’ as synonyms.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).