Section 3.2.2 of Chapter 2 of Part II of the Patent Examination Guide stipulates that claims should be clear, including two aspects: First, each claim should be clear; Second, all the claims that constitute the whole claim should also be clear. When the applicant sees such problems pointed out in the notice, he must accurately understand the specific reasons for the defects pointed out by the examiner, analyze whether the opinions in the notice are correct, and modify the defects pointed out when necessary.
There are usually several situations that will lead to unclear claims: an unclear text does not affect the scope of protection of claims. In this case, we can communicate with the examiner and discuss how to modify the text in detail to overcome this defect; Another unclear situation may lead to the change of the protection scope of the claim. At this point, when modifying the claim, we should consider how to add fewer technical features to overcome the defects pointed out: the third category is that the original claim is incorrectly expressed in words and its technical scheme is incorrect, which leads to unclear claims. At this point, the claim should be correctly defined according to the contents recorded in the specification, so as to clearly express the protection scope of the claim.
In addition, the unclear claim may also be caused by some immaterial formal defects. At this time, we only need to overcome these formal defects. There are also some cases caused by improper description. For the modification of this defect, the expression can be changed according to the specification.