It is understood that minor changes in claims wording are done with strike-throughs, with underlined new wording either immediately preceding or following. What about when more extensive changes are planned that would change the order of a series of indented clauses under an independent or dependent claim? Let's say one or more entire indented items of an independent claim is desired to be moved to a different order position. Should everything affected by the order change be struck through, following by the newly ordered items, even if the section(s) have no wording changes? To further clarify, this relates to order changes of subsections of a claim, not reordering of numbered claims since that's not allowed.
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Just re-ordering may not achieve your goal of changing the scope of the claim. If you like, you could formulate another question regarding the substance of what you are trying to accomplish.– George White ♦Dec 28, 2017 at 2:45
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1 Answer
There is no shortcut for indicating a change of the order of text in amending a claim so crossing out all the indented sections and repeating them in the desired order would be needed.
However there is an alternative that might look better. You can cancel the claim in question (just indicate its status as canceled - no need to have crossed through text). Then you add a claim at the end, with the next number. As an example, if you have 8 claims and the one you want to re-arrange is claim 1, then cancel claim 1 and add a "new" claim 9 that has the wording you now prefer. If another claim, say claim 2, is dependent on claim 1, then amend claim two so that its dependency is on claim 9, not claim 1.
answered Dec 28, 2017 at 2:43
