Patent law is territorial. It is also designed to deal with the
circumstance of unified infringement by a single actor. But modern commerce
is not limited by national boundaries or by corporate forms. Patents
written to cover modern technologies, particularly network computing
technologies, are attempting to bring the distributed acts of different
users around the globe into the ambit of a territorial legal system that
looks for a single infringer. Not surprisingly, the effort to do so has
created significant problems for patent cases.
Two of those problems are the subject of our article. They involve what we
call divided or distributed patent claims - claims that are infringed only
by aggregating the conduct of more than one actor, or aggregating conduct
that occurs in more than one country. Patent law doesn't deal well with
either class of divided patent claim. Prosecutors and litigators need to be
aware of these problems in order to most effectively represent their
clients.