brentashley

My friend and mentor Greg Vincent (no link yet) sent me a link today to this article that explains how an upcoming Supreme Court case could make it extemely difficult in the future to invalidate patents due to obviousness.

The gist is that the test would be interpreted to require prior publication of discussion of the obvious feature to prove obviousness.

But opposing a patent on those grounds can be harder than it sounds. According to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Patent Office or the challenger of a patent must produce written documentation that someone suggested the substance of the patent before it was filed. That test “forces litigants to search through reams of technical papers for a document in which someone, somewhere, bother to state the obvious”…

The quagmire thickens…