The Doctrine of Equivalents

The doctrine of equivalents is a set of rules of legal events applicable to patent acts in almost all the countries globally. The procedure  allows a legal mechanism or appellate bodies to deliver judgment whether a  party(defendant/s or appellant/s), liable for infringing patents even though the process, object or element does not come into the purview of the scope of the claim of a patent, but  have equivalence of the claimed invention..

Relevant Case/s: Ref: Manupatra/Westlaw Database [Royal Typewriter Co. v. Remington Rand, Inc., 168 F.2d 691, 692 (2d Cir. 1948]).

The main aim for implementing this doctrine is to award and maximize the protection to the patent owners of their rights and oblige the rest to their duties. There is another approach followed especially in UK and it is ‘Pith and Marrow’ process. In this approach, the parts in a patent claim are determined first for level of essentiality by distinguishing prioritization invariable approach.

But most of the countries for example, United States, developed other approaches of interpreting patent claim(s) and among these, the most famous one is the ‘Doctrine of Equivalents’. This doctrine makes approaches more holistic if compared to Pith and Marrow.

There is one difficulty applying ‘Doctrine of Equivalents’ and it is the non-harmonizing in nature of the relevant act among various countries. Although it is being tried to develop a mechanism to make it similar, but the procedure is not getting much pace due to the disparity of the patent law in developed as well as the developing countries.