You have no idea what you are talking about. Filing a patent with the PTO will cost you either $385.00 or $770.00 depending if you a small entity or a large entity. Maintentance fees range between $455.00 and $3,200.00 depending on who you are and when in the patent term the fee is due. At the most, $6,220.00 will be paid over the lifetime of a patent in maintenance fees. See FY2004 Fee Schedule.
Please stop pulling numbers out of your ass and do some research on the subject before trying to sound like you know what you are talking about. Thanks.
So in order to test the obviousness,... is a strong indicator that the alleged invention is simple enough that it does not need the incentive of a patent in order for it to be created.
I see this line of reasoning here all the time. However, just because something is simple does not mean that it is obvious. It works the other way around to: an obvious idea is not neceissarily simple. Please stop equating these two concepts.
Actually I might have to take back my previous statement about that being a valid argument. After rereading it, it looks like this:
If p then q. Not-q. Therefore, not-p.
p = existance of more intelligent life q = observation of event e
Basically this argument rests on the assumption that the only possible cause of event e is p. However, it is logically possible that event e could be caused by a different event (although in the case of alien contact and how you define event e, I will admit that this is unlikely).
You did hint to the first two premises in your original post, but didn't spell them out to the point that I considered them in my reply, although looking back I can see that they were covered.
An argument of that form would be valid, however your first assumption is false. The existance of more intelligent life does not require that the more intelligent life would necessarily attempt to contact us. They could very will just observere us from afar or ignore us completely. Also, depending on how you define event e, we might not necessarily observer it.
As originally presented you did not specifically say the first two assumptions, so just looking at 3 and 4, it looks like an appeal to ignorance (to me at least).
Logically speaking you have commited an appeal to ignorance fallacy. Just because we have not seen any probes flying around our solar system does not mean that more intelligent life does not exist somewhere out there. Hell, it doesn't even mean that the existance of more intelligent life is "highly unlikely". All it means is that we have a question for which we have no confirmed answer.
Be careful with your terms. In the legal sense novel (see MPEP 2131 Anticipation) means that the exact system as claimed does not exist in the prior art. Most of the time this is true, the real question becomes whether or not the claims are obvious. The condition for obviousness in the legal sense is that references exist which teach all parts of the claims, and that there exists motivation in the prior art to combine the references to obtain the claimed system with a reasonable expectation of success (see MPEP 2143 Basic Requirements of a Prima Facie Case of Obviousness). This is very different from teh common dictionary definition of the term.
Difficulty of implementation and obviousness of an idea are completely unrelated.
An artificial intelligence system is an obvious idea these days, but its implementation is very difficult. On the other hand the proverbial "better rat trap" would be comparatively simple to implement, but unobvious.
1) Do you think Borland did not have the idea 5 months before it was announced to the world. At the time, Borland was shipping new version about every 2 years. Note: I'm not accusing MS of patenting idea they saw from Borland, just remarking that Borland most likely had the idea first. Since I don't have access to internal Borland docs, I can't prove legally.
And therein lies the problem, if it can't be proven legally then it doens't affect the patentability of an application. Even assuming that Borland had the idea prior to the priority date of this patent, that doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't have it prior to them. Since the US is bases patent rights on first to invent, the true date to beat might be even eariler than the March, 1999 date.
2) Since the patent app was basically secret, isn't this sufficient proof that the patent was not novel (in the legal sense)? Borland did not even think this worthy of a patent.
No. The problem is that the claims must have been legally obvious before the priority date. Basically this means that any information that was first publicly disclosed after the filing date is not considered in determining the patentability of an application. Also Borlands thoughts on the worthiness of the invention are irrelevant in determining legal obviousness. How do we know that Borland did not think this worthy of a patent? It is entirely possible that Microsoft and Borland have a mutual cross-licensing agreement between them and Borland didn't bother filing an application because they would get rights to Microsoft's.
3) I don't believe that the race to the patent office is the best way to determine winners, esp. since such rules favor deep pockets. Novel should not mean who can beat feet to the patent office fastest. PTO prior art search for software patents is pitiful.
Who gets to the patent office first is irrelevant under the US system which grants rights to the first to invent (assuming that both parties can prove a date of invention, see MPEP 2300 Interference Proceedings for more information about how this works). As far as the patent office's prior art searches how much do you actually know about them and how much are you assuming about them?
4)... Patent laws were never designed to cover mathmatic discoveries, or discovering natural laws -- only the novel application of such natural discoveries.
Quite true, however the laws as written are up for interpretation by the courts. The courts apparently don't consider software a mathematic discovery or a natural law.
5)... Software is not like hardware. I don't need to build a $100 million manufacting plant to produce software economically.
I fail to see how software production costs factor into this. Writing software is not free. There are labor costs and various other support costs (offices, electricity, computers, etc..) which must be recoped if any money is to be made by a piece of software. Physical production costs are just piece of producing any product.
6)... E) If however, MS had done a clean-room reverse engineering project, this should be legal (excepting anti-trust considerations). Reverse engineering software does not violate copyright. F) Stac had a better product (though more expensive due to MS bundling), so Stac had grounds for recovery under anti-trust law.
No, it probably wouldn't violate copyright law (copyright really isn't my specialty by any means), but that is irrelevant. Under patent law a reimplementation of the same system using the same components for the same purpose is considered an obvious variant, which is protected. If Microsoft did exactly this, then they would be liable under patent law and could be taken to court (which they apparently were). The anti-trust law is also irrelevant to this discussion since Microsoft probably wouldn't have been considered a monopoly back in those days, a
From the patent This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/123,102, filed Mar. 5, 1999, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
The date you have to beat is March 5, 1999 not the March, 2000 filing date, so Delphi 5 may not count depending on when it was released.
You must be careful with which definition of the word "obvious" you are using. The dictionary defintion and the legal definition as interpreted by the US court system are fairly different. For example, the dictionary definition is given as "easily perceived or understood". The legal definition of obvious is a concept which must be proved and is not open to individual interpretation. See for example, MPEP 2142 Legal Concept of Prima Facie Obviousness which states:
To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art, and not based on applicant"s disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria.
Something may seem obvious to you (with the benefit of hindsight) and still be nonobvious according to the legal requirements of the term.
Follow this logic: While we can't make vending machines clever enough to tell the difference between real dollars and fake ones, we can make your computer smart enough to not let you do anything with money.
This surprises you? What do you think the difference is processing power is between your average vending machine and your average home computer?
Was this means plus function claim language (i.e. 112 6th)? In that case the abstract and the specification are taken to interpret what the claimed means includes. However, without means plus function language the abstract should have no bearing on the what the claim covers.
Besides, most of this is too confusing for the standard slashdot drone, so its a lot easier to say that the abstract is worthless than it is to go into the minute details of the law.
Abstracts are worthless as far as patent rights are concerned. They are supposed to be a summary of what the patent is claiming and discussing, although sometimes they don't even accomplish that much. If you want to know what the patent covers look at the claims.
I should really sit down and write some instant response form paragraph which says this because I invariably end up having to set someone straight about this in almost every slashdot patent story.
I think Verizon is the only company with reception in the DC metro system, not sure if it is because of some exclusive licensing or if they are the only ones who have put up antennas there. I have Verizon and get pretty decent reception throughout my normal work commute (Blue and Orange lines), although there is one or two spots where I have dropped calls.
That is a very good job at describing the patent in question, but the goal was to come up with a simple way to accurately enter characters. Since the requirement for actually recognizing the real english language has been thrown out by being able to make up your own caracters. Why not just assign a bit to a given box and identify the the blocks which have been activated (1) and which have not been activated (0)? That sounds like a much simpler system to me, so why bother with all the complexity of directions and starting and ending points and line identification?
Characters can be said to consist of four types of lines: vertical (|), horizontal (-), diagonal up (/), and diagonal down (\) . These four lines each have two possible "directions" (e.g. "-" can be left-to-right or right-to-left). A 3x3 grid is the minumum required resolution for accurately mapping those four types of lines.
Why is 3x3 the minimum? 2x2 can map those lines just as well:
| = top left to bottom left or top right to bottom right (or vice versa) - = top left to top right or bottom left to bottom right (or vice versa) \ = top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left / = top right to bottom left or bottom left to top right
Place a circle (or a + sign, etc...) in the exact center which is unresponsive and you avoid any problem of crossing over boxes when moving across the center. Once again, this is a simplier system than the 3x3 system so, naturally it should have been used to satisfy the simplification requirement.
It really is the obvious solution to decoding a simplified alphabet, which (by the way) is what the court ruled!
Did you read the decision of the court? I didn't, so I don't know for sure what they ruled. If you did, I'd very much like a link to it so I can read it as well. Also, even if this was ruled obvious by the court, it would have been ruled obvious under the legal definition of the term, and not the everyday laymans definitions of the term which is what you are trying to argue for.
It's obvious, e.g. the graffiti area can discern the position of the stylus with a resolution of, say, 45 along the vertical axis and 90 horizontally. Now, trying to come up with a quick, low processing requirement method of mapping characters leads directly to the question of "how fine a resolution do we need to track?" This then leads to the answer, "if we come up with our own simple alphabet, we can cut it down to as low as a three by three grid". It may not be obvious to YOU, but anyone trying to solve the problem of handwriting recognition would think of it based on the first rule of solving ANY problem: SIMPLIFY.
Simplify eh. There are 26 letters in the english alphabet, since we are creating out own representation of these, we don't have to provide an a system which allows entry of the standard characters and can use any format we wish. We would logically need to represent only 26 combinations, or 5 bits (i.e. 2^5 = 32) to represent each letter. If you were to simplify the problem to the fullest, using 9 bits (i.e. a 3x3 grid) would lead to 512 (i.e. 2^9) possibilities and would be a waste of resources. So why bother with a 3x3 grid when it can be done with only 5 squares? Even adding in numbers and common punctuation marks, there is no reason to jump up to 9 bits of resolution.
Your simplification argument fails to stand up to its own standards.
The 1996 date doesn't matter as far as prior art is concerned. The date to beat is October 1, 1993, or possibly March, 1993 for some of the stuff (continuatin in part application).
The main problem with software patents now is that there is no good unified database of what has already been done. There have been countless projects which have been started up, developed for a while and then abandoned after the developer got sick of working with it. If there was a database of all these projects from over the years it would make the examiners job a lot easier and there would be a lot more relevant prior art found.
As far as the threat that prior art may be found based on the number of entries in a database I don't think that would have to much of an effect of the perceived validity of an issued patent. A patent is assumed valid in court simply because it issued, it would be up to the defendant to prove otherwise. Although such a database might make it easier to find that proof.
Prior art is any product, publication, of piece of information which has a provable existance date prior to the effective filing date of a patent application. This covers previous patents, journal aricles, magazine and newspaper articles, dated websites, movies, video games, comics, recorded speeches, commercial products, etc... Basically any bit of public knowledge that you can prove existed prior to the effective filing date of the application can be used as prior art. However, if you can't prove the date that it existed, it can not be used as prior art. This means that you talking to a bunch of coworkers about some idea Chili's happy hour doesn't count as prior art unless you can prove that what you talked about and when.
I have anything that gets moderated as "Funny" automatically given a -4 modifier. It really helps to cut down on at the "I patent patents!" shit that for some reason gets modereated up every single damn time it is posted. I strongly suggest trying it.
The problem with the situation of your previous comment is that obviousness is determined at the time the invention was made (i.e. at the time of filing unless an affadavit or declaration is filed to prove an earlier invention date). To go back to the MPEP Section 2143 (a very good section to read if you are interested in how obviousness is determined under current US laws btw):
Whether an art is predictable or whether the proposed modification or combination of the
prior art has a reasonable expectation of success is determined at the time the invention was made. Ex parte Erlich, 3USPQ2d 1011 (Bd. Pat. App. & Inter. 1986) (Although an earlier case reversed a rejection because of unpredictability in the field of monoclonal antibodies, the court found "in this case at the time this invention was made, one of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to produce monoclonal antibodies specific for human fibroplast interferon using the method of [the prior art] with a reasonable expectation of success." 3 USPQ2d at 1016 (emphasis in original).).
Unless the OSS project was created prior to the filing date of the patent application, it can't be used as prior art or as proof of obviousness simply because of the dates invovled.
A statement that modifications of the prior art to meet the claimed invention would have been " well within the ordinary skill of the art at the time the claimed invention was made' " because the references relied upon teach that all aspects of the claimed invention were individually known in the art is not sufficient to establish a prima facie case of obviousness without some objective reason to combine the teachings of the references. Ex parte Levengood, 28USPQ2d 1300 (Bd. Pat. App. & Inter. 1993). See also In re Kotzab, 217 F.3d 1365, 1371, 55 USPQ2d 1313, 1318 (Fed. Cir. 2000) (Court reversed obviousness rejection involving technologically simple concept because there was no finding as to the principle or specific understanding within the knowledge of a skilled artisan that would have motivated the skilled artisan to make the claimed invention); Al-Site Corp. v. VSI Int'l Inc., 174 F.3d 1308, 50 USPQ2d 1161 (Fed. Cir. 1999) (The level of skill in the art cannot be relied upon to provide the suggestion to combine references.).
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea what you are talking about. Filing a patent with the PTO will cost you either $385.00 or $770.00 depending if you a small entity or a large entity. Maintentance fees range between $455.00 and $3,200.00 depending on who you are and when in the patent term the fee is due. At the most, $6,220.00 will be paid over the lifetime of a patent in maintenance fees. See FY2004 Fee Schedule.
Please stop pulling numbers out of your ass and do some research on the subject before trying to sound like you know what you are talking about. Thanks.
Cencourse: Global Mail
Precision Research: ???
Pronet Analytics: G-Mail technology discussed here
Gospel Music: GMail
Re: Title
I was unaware that access to cellular providers and ISPs outage information was a right. Where exactly was that right given to us again?
So in order to test the obviousness, ... is a strong indicator that the alleged invention is simple enough that it does not need the incentive of a patent in order for it to be created.
I see this line of reasoning here all the time. However, just because something is simple does not mean that it is obvious. It works the other way around to: an obvious idea is not neceissarily simple. Please stop equating these two concepts.
Actually I might have to take back my previous statement about that being a valid argument. After rereading it, it looks like this:
If p then q.
Not-q.
Therefore, not-p.
p = existance of more intelligent life
q = observation of event e
Basically this argument rests on the assumption that the only possible cause of event e is p. However, it is logically possible that event e could be caused by a different event (although in the case of alien contact and how you define event e, I will admit that this is unlikely).
You did hint to the first two premises in your original post, but didn't spell them out to the point that I considered them in my reply, although looking back I can see that they were covered.
An argument of that form would be valid, however your first assumption is false. The existance of more intelligent life does not require that the more intelligent life would necessarily attempt to contact us. They could very will just observere us from afar or ignore us completely. Also, depending on how you define event e, we might not necessarily observer it.
As originally presented you did not specifically say the first two assumptions, so just looking at 3 and 4, it looks like an appeal to ignorance (to me at least).
Logically speaking you have commited an appeal to ignorance fallacy. Just because we have not seen any probes flying around our solar system does not mean that more intelligent life does not exist somewhere out there. Hell, it doesn't even mean that the existance of more intelligent life is "highly unlikely". All it means is that we have a question for which we have no confirmed answer.
Be careful with your terms. In the legal sense novel (see MPEP 2131 Anticipation) means that the exact system as claimed does not exist in the prior art. Most of the time this is true, the real question becomes whether or not the claims are obvious. The condition for obviousness in the legal sense is that references exist which teach all parts of the claims, and that there exists motivation in the prior art to combine the references to obtain the claimed system with a reasonable expectation of success (see MPEP 2143 Basic Requirements of a Prima Facie Case of Obviousness). This is very different from teh common dictionary definition of the term.
Difficulty of implementation and obviousness of an idea are completely unrelated.
An artificial intelligence system is an obvious idea these days, but its implementation is very difficult. On the other hand the proverbial "better rat trap" would be comparatively simple to implement, but unobvious.
1) Do you think Borland did not have the idea 5 months before it was announced to the world. At the time, Borland was shipping new version about every 2 years. Note: I'm not accusing MS of patenting idea they saw from Borland, just remarking that Borland most likely had the idea first. Since I don't have access to internal Borland docs, I can't prove legally.
And therein lies the problem, if it can't be proven legally then it doens't affect the patentability of an application. Even assuming that Borland had the idea prior to the priority date of this patent, that doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't have it prior to them. Since the US is bases patent rights on first to invent, the true date to beat might be even eariler than the March, 1999 date.
2) Since the patent app was basically secret, isn't this sufficient proof that the patent was not novel (in the legal sense)? Borland did not even think this worthy of a patent.
No. The problem is that the claims must have been legally obvious before the priority date. Basically this means that any information that was first publicly disclosed after the filing date is not considered in determining the patentability of an application. Also Borlands thoughts on the worthiness of the invention are irrelevant in determining legal obviousness. How do we know that Borland did not think this worthy of a patent? It is entirely possible that Microsoft and Borland have a mutual cross-licensing agreement between them and Borland didn't bother filing an application because they would get rights to Microsoft's.
3) I don't believe that the race to the patent office is the best way to determine winners, esp. since such rules favor deep pockets. Novel should not mean who can beat feet to the patent office fastest. PTO prior art search for software patents is pitiful.
Who gets to the patent office first is irrelevant under the US system which grants rights to the first to invent (assuming that both parties can prove a date of invention, see MPEP 2300 Interference Proceedings for more information about how this works). As far as the patent office's prior art searches how much do you actually know about them and how much are you assuming about them?
4)... Patent laws were never designed to cover mathmatic discoveries, or discovering natural laws -- only the novel application of such natural discoveries.
Quite true, however the laws as written are up for interpretation by the courts. The courts apparently don't consider software a mathematic discovery or a natural law.
5)... Software is not like hardware. I don't need to build a $100 million manufacting plant to produce software economically.
I fail to see how software production costs factor into this. Writing software is not free. There are labor costs and various other support costs (offices, electricity, computers, etc..) which must be recoped if any money is to be made by a piece of software. Physical production costs are just piece of producing any product.
6)... E) If however, MS had done a clean-room reverse engineering project, this should be legal (excepting anti-trust considerations). Reverse engineering software does not violate copyright. F) Stac had a better product (though more expensive due to MS bundling), so Stac had grounds for recovery under anti-trust law.
No, it probably wouldn't violate copyright law (copyright really isn't my specialty by any means), but that is irrelevant. Under patent law a reimplementation of the same system using the same components for the same purpose is considered an obvious variant, which is protected. If Microsoft did exactly this, then they would be liable under patent law and could be taken to court (which they apparently were). The anti-trust law is also irrelevant to this discussion since Microsoft probably wouldn't have been considered a monopoly back in those days, a
From the patent This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/123,102, filed Mar. 5, 1999, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
The date you have to beat is March 5, 1999 not the March, 2000 filing date, so Delphi 5 may not count depending on when it was released.
Follow this logic: While we can't make vending machines clever enough to tell the difference between real dollars and fake ones, we can make your computer smart enough to not let you do anything with money.
This surprises you? What do you think the difference is processing power is between your average vending machine and your average home computer?
Sorry to say, but you were wrong and fw3 was right about 102(b). It is in fact one year from the date of disclosure, not the date of invention.
Was this means plus function claim language (i.e. 112 6th)? In that case the abstract and the specification are taken to interpret what the claimed means includes. However, without means plus function language the abstract should have no bearing on the what the claim covers.
Besides, most of this is too confusing for the standard slashdot drone, so its a lot easier to say that the abstract is worthless than it is to go into the minute details of the law.
Abstracts are worthless as far as patent rights are concerned. They are supposed to be a summary of what the patent is claiming and discussing, although sometimes they don't even accomplish that much. If you want to know what the patent covers look at the claims.
I should really sit down and write some instant response form paragraph which says this because I invariably end up having to set someone straight about this in almost every slashdot patent story.
I think Verizon is the only company with reception in the DC metro system, not sure if it is because of some exclusive licensing or if they are the only ones who have put up antennas there. I have Verizon and get pretty decent reception throughout my normal work commute (Blue and Orange lines), although there is one or two spots where I have dropped calls.
That is a very good job at describing the patent in question, but the goal was to come up with a simple way to accurately enter characters. Since the requirement for actually recognizing the real english language has been thrown out by being able to make up your own caracters. Why not just assign a bit to a given box and identify the the blocks which have been activated (1) and which have not been activated (0)? That sounds like a much simpler system to me, so why bother with all the complexity of directions and starting and ending points and line identification?
Characters can be said to consist of four types of lines: vertical (|), horizontal (-), diagonal up (/), and diagonal down (\) . These four lines each have two possible "directions" (e.g. "-" can be left-to-right or right-to-left). A 3x3 grid is the minumum required resolution for accurately mapping those four types of lines.
Why is 3x3 the minimum? 2x2 can map those lines just as well:
| = top left to bottom left or top right to bottom right (or vice versa)
- = top left to top right or bottom left to bottom right (or vice versa)
\ = top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left
/ = top right to bottom left or bottom left to top right
Place a circle (or a + sign, etc...) in the exact center which is unresponsive and you avoid any problem of crossing over boxes when moving across the center. Once again, this is a simplier system than the 3x3 system so, naturally it should have been used to satisfy the simplification requirement.
It really is the obvious solution to decoding a simplified alphabet, which (by the way) is what the court ruled!
Did you read the decision of the court? I didn't, so I don't know for sure what they ruled. If you did, I'd very much like a link to it so I can read it as well. Also, even if this was ruled obvious by the court, it would have been ruled obvious under the legal definition of the term, and not the everyday laymans definitions of the term which is what you are trying to argue for.
It's obvious, e.g. the graffiti area can discern the position of the stylus with a resolution of, say, 45 along the vertical axis and 90 horizontally. Now, trying to come up with a quick, low processing requirement method of mapping characters leads directly to the question of "how fine a resolution do we need to track?" This then leads to the answer, "if we come up with our own simple alphabet, we can cut it down to as low as a three by three grid". It may not be obvious to YOU, but anyone trying to solve the problem of handwriting recognition would think of it based on the first rule of solving ANY problem: SIMPLIFY.
Simplify eh. There are 26 letters in the english alphabet, since we are creating out own representation of these, we don't have to provide an a system which allows entry of the standard characters and can use any format we wish. We would logically need to represent only 26 combinations, or 5 bits (i.e. 2^5 = 32) to represent each letter. If you were to simplify the problem to the fullest, using 9 bits (i.e. a 3x3 grid) would lead to 512 (i.e. 2^9) possibilities and would be a waste of resources. So why bother with a 3x3 grid when it can be done with only 5 squares? Even adding in numbers and common punctuation marks, there is no reason to jump up to 9 bits of resolution.
Your simplification argument fails to stand up to its own standards.
The 1996 date doesn't matter as far as prior art is concerned. The date to beat is October 1, 1993, or possibly March, 1993 for some of the stuff (continuatin in part application).
The main problem with software patents now is that there is no good unified database of what has already been done. There have been countless projects which have been started up, developed for a while and then abandoned after the developer got sick of working with it. If there was a database of all these projects from over the years it would make the examiners job a lot easier and there would be a lot more relevant prior art found.
As far as the threat that prior art may be found based on the number of entries in a database I don't think that would have to much of an effect of the perceived validity of an issued patent. A patent is assumed valid in court simply because it issued, it would be up to the defendant to prove otherwise. Although such a database might make it easier to find that proof.
I have anything that gets moderated as "Funny" automatically given a -4 modifier. It really helps to cut down on at the "I patent patents!" shit that for some reason gets modereated up every single damn time it is posted. I strongly suggest trying it.
From the MPEP Section 2143:
A statement that modifications of the prior art to meet the claimed invention would have
been " well within the ordinary skill of the art at the time the claimed invention was made'
" because the references relied upon teach that all aspects of the claimed invention were
individually known in the art is not sufficient to establish a prima facie case of
obviousness without some objective reason to combine the teachings of the references.
Ex parte Levengood, 28USPQ2d 1300 (Bd. Pat. App. & Inter. 1993). See also In re
Kotzab, 217 F.3d 1365, 1371, 55 USPQ2d 1313, 1318 (Fed. Cir. 2000) (Court
reversed obviousness rejection involving technologically simple concept because there
was no finding as to the principle or specific understanding within the knowledge of a
skilled artisan that would have motivated the skilled artisan to make the claimed
invention); Al-Site Corp. v. VSI Int'l Inc., 174 F.3d 1308, 50 USPQ2d 1161 (Fed. Cir.
1999) (The level of skill in the art cannot be relied upon to provide the suggestion to
combine references.).