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| Authored by: PolR on Monday, March 11 2013 @ 07:59 PM EDT |
Patent lawyers at the USPTO and elsewhere are required to have a degree in an
engineering discipline. This is a requirement to be even allowed to take the
patent bar exam. Please don't underestimate their technical capabilities.
There are good reasons to use semiotics.
One of them is we can tap on the works of law professor Keith Emerson Collins
who has published on the applicability of semiotics to the printed matter
doctrine. If we don't use semiotics we can't rely on this source.
The other reason is the difference semiotics makes between an interpretant and a
referent. Both fall under the broad category of meaning. One is abstract the
other is concrete. This is how we distinguish between an abstract idea and
patent on an industrial process for curing rubber.
The pictogram analogy doesn't convey this distinction. There is only the
physical pictogram and the meaning. Sure this difference is easy to understand.
But this is not doing any good because we are unable to explain why sometimes
meaning leads to patentable inventions and sometimes it doesn't. This
explanation requires to distinguish between an interpretant and a referent and
the legal details of how this works are found in Collins' article.
Please note that topic four uses a painting of a pipe as an explanation. This is
not much different from the pictogram.
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