The So-Called Purposive Construction of Patent Claims: Comments on Whirlpool and Free World Trust
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author comments two cases, Whirlpool and Free World Trust, where the Supreme Court of Canada adopted the purposive construction of patent claims, which suppresses the purely textual interpretation, strengthening however the interpretation regarding the essence and substance of an invention. The author criticizes the Court's solution, indicating that the use of more rigorous rules of construction or the formulation of more detailed principles or methods of construction cannot reduce the legal uncertainty associated with the construction of such claims. Ideally, the solution would have been to determine the author's intent, based on the meaning of the words, the context in which the words were used and the object or purpose of the text under scrutiny. The aim is neither to reject nor to prefer a method, but rather to use all appropriate methods to interpret a text in a just and reasonable manner, given the particular circumstances of a case.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.058 | 0.041 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".