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[Yet another examiner]

I often see claims drafted along the lines of:

"A contraption comprising at least one widget and at least one gizmo..."

What is the advantage of phrasing the claim in such a way instead of just saying

"A contraption comprising a widget and a gizmo..."?

[JimIvey]

What is the advantage of phrasing the claim in such a way instead of just saying

"A contraption comprising a widget and a gizmo..."?

That's been discussed in here many times (can't find a link right now).  The bottom line is that there shouldn't be any advantage except that someone somewhere might argue and prevail (even in court well beyond examination) that "a widget" is exactly one widget and no more.  Yes, "comprising" means you can add more, even more widgets, and still infringe.  But who wants to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars arguing that particular issue in court?

You can chalk that up to an over abundance of caution by the patent bar. 

Hmmm....  I wonder if "comprising at least:" would help.  I use "at least" in other contexts, like "a computer-readable medium .... configured to cause a computer to [do nifty preamble stuff] by at least:" followed by method steps.

Regards.

[BobRoberts]

"You can chalk that up to an over abundance of caution by the patent bar.  "

I hear you Jim.  Unfortunately, we (most of us?) as the Patent Bar seem to cause our own problems.  In the name of "aggresively representing clients to the fullest," applications are nit-picked and held to standards that we would never consider when we draft our own applications.  Already stretched caselaw is warped during arguments and memoranda.  Then, some court that has a minimal understand of patent law buys the arguments, turning them into a warped-interpretation of the law.  Then we over-interpret this ruling, and in the abundunce of caution, read additional extrapolations into the case law, and are left shooting in the dark as to how to draft a patent application, or argue for patentability...  Shesh....  This really drives this engineering-type batty!

I blame it on computers and the internet.  Without the Internet, we were left to researching the minimal caselaw we had before us.  Without computers, we couldn't draft a thousand iterations of memoranda or patent applications, so we learned to be suscinct and articulate in what we were saying...  Unfortunately, I seem to be especially guilty lf the later.

Down with Computers!   

[JimIvey]

I blame it on computers and the internet. 

Well, that's just not fair.  I've been a computer scientist for decades and computers have nothing to do with it.

First, "one or more widgets" isn't all that bad, particularly in the claims. 

Second, I'd say that most of the convoluted language one sees in patent applications is due to practitioners out-clevering themselves or trying to reduce all of patent law into lists of good words and bad words.  We had a recent discussion here regarding the use of "the present invention" in an application.  Some think the phrase is strictly taboo while others (including myself) thing it's fine as long as you don't describe it directly outside the claims.  Some practitioners like to qualify every verb in an application with "may or may not".  Some insist on sprinkling applications with generous helpings of "said" and "plurality" to make it all old-timey and lawyerly sounding.  Others like a good page or two of boilerplate defining "the" and "a/an" and "or" and "and" but don't bother defining things like "software" or "logic" or other claim terms.

Luckily for me, patent drafting isn't so easily reduced to a few easy-to-touch icons.  Even though a computer might be the next Jeopardy champion, I think it will be a long time before anything but a well-skilled human writer can do this work.  This work necessarily includes nuance and it's very difficult to make nuance readable, or to get it right for that matter.

Regards.