Appeal No. 2002-1474 Page 10 Application No. 09/002,927 Furthermore, the general claim construction principle that limitations found only in the specification of a patent or patent application should not be imported or read into a claim must be followed. See In re Priest, 582 F.2d 33, 37, 199 USPQ 11, 15 (CCPA 1978). One must be careful not to confuse impermissible imputing of limitations from the specification into a claim with the proper reference to the specification to determine the meaning of a particular word or phrase recited in a claim. See E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Phillips Petroleum Co., 849 F.2d 1430, 1433, 7 USPQ2d 1129, 1131 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 986 (1988). What we are dealing with in this case is the construction of the limitations recited in the appealed claims. As stated by the court in In re Hiniker Co., 150 F.3d 1362, 1369, 47 USPQ2d 1523, 1529 (Fed. Cir. 1998) "[t]he name of the game is the claim." Claims will be given their broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification, and limitations appearing in the specification are not to be read into the claims. In re Etter, 756 F.2d 852, 858, 225 USPQ 1, 5 (Fed. Cir. 1985). We find that the claim 1 language "when the vehicle information receiving means receives a vehicle information based on image data, the vehicle information based on image data isPage: Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007