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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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This is not really a problem in patents | 122 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
This is not really a problem in patents
Authored by: TennSeven on Tuesday, August 21 2012 @ 02:05 PM EDT
As PJ points out in the article, I am sure that it often
appears to someone with no legal training that terms of art
in the legal field do not mean what they should, but I
assure you that terms of art in the legal field, just as
terms of art in every other field, mean very specific
things and are often used more correctly by attorneys than
by the population at large. Your assertion that an attorney
would ever be able to make a living writing contracts and
agreements that "have no valid definition" is simply absurd.

The fact that an attorney might pick very specific words to
convey precisely what he means, while leaving out precisely
the things he does not want to include does not make him a
weasel; it just makes him precise.

For instance, I recently got into a debate with someone who
said that the Internet was invented by CERN. I pointed out
that CERN did not even start to use TCP/IP until the mid-to-
late 80's and politely suggested that perhaps he meant to
say that CERN developed the World Wide Web. I was
immediately attacked for being "pedantic" and told that,
since the majority of the population sees the World Wide Web
as the "Internet," I was in fact wrong and this other
gentleman (I use the term in the loosest sense of the word)
was correct. I urged this person to simply say
what he means in the future in an effort to avoid
misunderstandings before they appear, which is a trait I
find to be much more common among practicing lawyers than
among the general public.

Now, was I being a weasel here, or just precise?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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