Case: Patents/Obviousness (P.T.A.B.)

Challenged claims of a patent that discloses a search engine that provides intuitive mechanisms for searching databases are unpatentable as obvious over prior art, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board said, in an inter partes review by Oracle Corp. The board determined that the challenged claims are obvious over various combinations of prior art, including prior art that discloses a method for managing the presentation of search terms on a computer terminal or other display device, a menu authoring system that generates a tab list menu that links to a set of sublists, and an interoperability layer that permits database ...