Court’s Inventor Addition on Water Hose Patents Upheld on Appeal

Tristar Products Inc. correctly argued that a co-inventor had been left off of six patents for an expandable water hose asserted against it in an infringement case, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed Friday,

The panel used the dispute to clarify that a district court needn't define all of the terms in a patent before ruling on an inventorship dispute.

"The court is not required to prospectively address hypothetical claim construction disputes. That is as true for inventorship analyses as it is for invalidity and infringement analyses," Judge Sharon Prost wrote in the precedential opinion. ...

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