How Do You Read a U.S. Patent? Motivation for Descriptions of Intellectual Property and Its 'Metes and Bounds'
Narratives in Academic and Professional Genres, Maurizio Gotti & Carmen Sancho Guinda, eds., Peter Lang, Forthcoming
Posted: 21 Oct 2012
Date Written: July 20, 2012
Abstract
The transformation process of an idea, first, into an invention and, then, into potentially lucrative intellectual property includes its definition through the use of words and drawings. The validity status of this definition will be judged according to the criteria of a granting body. The text of those property definitions (patents) that are deemed valid becomes the official form of the idea for the duration of the patent (Bazerman, 1999: 90). This transition from idea to legal statement of private intellectual property involves an applicant authorship group (inventors, lawyers, and sometimes translators), a primary application adjudicator (patent examiners), and a secondary application adjudicator (district courts). The financial interest of the applicant authorship group is to incorporate as much intellectual property as possible into their patent. This collides with the professional interest of the application adjudicators, who try to avoid any illegal property overlap. To achieve this maximum property scope, patent applicants resort to a tradition of stylistic practices (generic conventions) that allow them to define their invention within the validity criteria of the adjudicators. This chapter will show, with the help of a corpus of 369 U.S.patents, how patent drafters achieve zero-focalization by presenting their inventions as a sequence of relational processes, roughly, what Bal (1990: 138) terms as encyclopedic referential descriptions. These relational processes are precise enough to meet the sufficient disclosure (or enablement) and best mode requirements, but vague enough to cover the broadest intellectual property that can be allowed. As we can reason from Toolan’s (2007: 231) introduction to linguistic analysis of narrative, had the patent applications been written differently, they would not have achieved their status as private property.
Keywords: Genre, U.S. Patents, Narratology, Focalization, Generic Conventions
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation