基于修改的禁止反悔适用中的若干主要问题——以美国联邦法院专利判例为考察对象

The Main Issues When Applying Amendment——based Estoppel in American Patent Law

申请历史禁止反悔是对等同理论的最为重要的限制类型,其核心要义在于申请时已经被放弃的客体不能通过适用等同理论重新占有,目的是调和权利要求的公示作用与等同理论突破专利权利要求文字范围的矛盾,保护社会公众的信赖利益和创新活动自由。基于修改的禁止反悔是其中较为常见的一种类型,特点在于适用推定放弃的规则,其制度价值在于防止申请人在申请审查阶段应审查员要求而修改限缩其权利要求以获取专利授权,在嗣后的诉讼阶段利用等同理论把原先已放弃的内容纳入专利保护范围这种"两全其美"、两头得利的局面,保障专利制度的有效运行。

The prosecution history estoppel is one of the legal limitations on DOE, which remains a part of the judicial application of DOE, and is inherently consistent with the basic theory of DOE. The fundamental connotation of prosecution history estoppel（or estoppel） is that a patentable subject matter that had been surrendered in the process of patent prosecution cannot be claimed again in any ensuing patent litigations. The purpose of estoppel is to reconcile the contradiction between the public notice function of patent claim and DOE as a breakthrough of the literal scope of claim, and hence to protect the innovative freedom and reliance interest of the public. Amendment-based estoppel is one of the two fundamental types of estoppel and subject to the presumption-of-surrender rule. Its institutional value is to prevent the applicant from getting the best of both worlds through limiting the claim in prosecution process and recovering the surrendered subject matter in patent infringement litigation using the doctrine of equivalents.