Law Blog - WSJ.com : There's Nothing Obvious About Patent Law

Law Blog - WSJ.com : There's Nothing Obvious About Patent Law: "The Law Blog has written a bunch of stories on patent law lately, which, frankly, haven’t come easily. Science has never been our thang. We concentrated in History & Literature in college, and the two science requirements we took was a course called Plants (for the final exam we had to list 25 crops) and another called The Atmosphere ( nickname: “The Gut-mosphere”).

The other day we told a colleague that reading a patent law ruling sometimes felt like reading Greek. Thanks to How Appealing, we came across a case this morning that illustrates the sometimes inscrutability of this area of the law. Please read the decision and feel our pain.

The Federal Circuit issued a ruling upholding a decision from the patent office that rejected a patent on the grounds of obviousness. In April, the Supreme Court in KSR made it easier for trial-court judges to call an invention “obvious” and therefore ineligible for a patent, holding that “the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results.”

The patent at issue in Trans Texas involved a financial-services invention for a system of inflation-adjusted deposit and loan accounts. The court ruled that the invention was really obvious. The PTO Board “did not err in concluding that it would have been obvious to combine the indexed loan accounts disclosed in Mukherjee [an economics study] with the well-known practice of offering loans secured by mortgaged real estate,” said the court. Nor did the Board “err in concluding that it would have been obvious to combine the known inflation-adjusted loan accounts of Mukherjee with the known balloon payments of Weiner.”

Put still another way, an earlier patent, nicknamed “Musamanno” filed in 1983, “demonstrates that it was notoriously well-known to employ data-processors to manage plural accounts,” according to a patent examiner. “And therefore,” wrote the court, “it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to apply Musamanno’s data processor to Mukherjee.” Got that? We thought so.

Law Blog Quote of the Day: With that we’d like to share, thanks to Business Week, a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who clearly laid out the concept of obviousness in patent law. A man “has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?”

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