An Obvious Posting

The most significant patent case in forty years is how the KSR v. Teleflex decision is being described.

For Slaw readers, who I suspect are not patent law afficionados, a sense of the impact of the decision can be gleaned from a good discussion in the Boston Globe and in Business Week.

And of course, Justice Kennedy’s decision is always worth reading. Whether KSR simply generates more uncertainty, one won’t know until lower courts try to make sense of its changes. But the decision is clearly important.

The question of what deserves a patent has turned on the conventional tests of patentability – KSR focuses anew on how courts define one term: “obvious.”