Appeals Court ‘Chips Away’ High Court’s Pliant Obviousness Take

Patent challengers have a new tool in their arsenal to attack a patent as obvious after the Federal Circuit reined in one argument some patent owners have used to fend off challenges.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit limited the weight given to general industry skepticism in analyses of whether a patent should be invalidated as obvious in a recent ruling in favor of Johnson & Johnson’s Auris Health Inc. That skepticism on its own isn’t enough to prove that an expert in the art wouldn’t have been motivated to combine earlier inventions into a new one—which ...