Over a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments, 134 S. Ct. 2120 (2014), replacing the Federal Circuit’s “insolubly ambiguous” standard with a “reasonable certainty” standard for analyzing whether patent claims are “definite.” Since then, several district court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decisions have confirmed that the standard has definitively changed. These decisions illustrate several new hurdles for patent owners and, in some cases, find claims invalid under Nautilus that were earlier found valid under the Federal Circuit’s “insolubly ambiguous” standard. The heightened definiteness scrutiny resulting from Nautilus may be particularly effective against patent trolls—entities that have traditionally relied on claims of ambiguous scope to leverage early settlements.
A patent must “conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming” the invention, according to 35 U.S.C. Section 112. Each claim in a patent that fails to meet this requirement may be found invalid for indefiniteness. Prior to Nautilus, the Federal Circuit applied a fairly lenient standard for meeting the requirement, invalidating claims for indefiniteness only where they were “insolubly ambiguous” or “not amenable to construction.”
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