[Source: Law Blog - WSJ]
[May 1, 2007]
The ruling in KSR v. Teleflex will make it harder to get new patents and to defend existing ones. The decision involves an arcane but vital area of patent law dealing with how to determine whether an invention is “obvious” and hence not patentable.
Click here for the opinion; here are stories from the Legal Times, NYT, WSJ and the WaPo.
Today, Peter Lattman comments on how KSR is already starting to have an effect, as in Friskit v. RealNetworks. Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco who previously had allowed a patent-infringement lawsuit to proceed against RealNetworks changed course and granted summary judgment, citing the KSR decision. The judge ruled that Friskit’s patent claims were nothing more than obvious combinations of elements publicly available, including RealNetworks’ own Internet products. Judge William Schwarzer concluded that “the idea of integrating these different components was not novel.”
Click here for the judge’s ruling in Friskit v. RealNetworks, and here for a copy of the transcript of a court hearing on the issue.
Read the WSJ article here.
