Case: Patents/Obviousness (Fed. Cir.)

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s finding, in Adidas AG’s inter partes review of Nike Inc.'s patents directed to methods of manufacturing an article of footwear with a textile upper, that the challenged claims are not unpatentable as obvious. The Federal Circuit found that, in view of the undisputed evidence of the pre-seaming differences between one prior art patent and another prior art patent, substantial evidence supports the board’s motivation-to-combine findings with respect to the Base Claims and that, because the Unitary Construction Claims depend from the independent Base Claims, substantial ...