Posts Tagged: "teaching away"

Teaching Away, Commercial Success, and Blocking Patent Doctrines All Under the CAFC Spotlight

In The Chemours Company FC, LLC v. Daikin Industries, Ltd., Nos. 2020-1289, 2020-1290 (Fed. Cir. July 22, 2021) (“Chemours v. Daikin”), the Federal Circuit clarified three doctrines involved in the determination of obviousness: teaching away, commercial success, and blocking patents. While all three panel judges agreed that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) misapplied the commercial success and blocking patents doctrines, they disagreed as to the Board’s application of the teaching away doctrine. In contrast to the Board, the majority found evidence of teaching away in the prior art. But Judge Dyk, dissenting, found no such evidence and called the majority’s determination an impermissible expansion of the doctrine that now encompassed a reference’s mere preference for a particular alternative.

CAFC Reverses PTAB Obviousness Finding, Clarifying Concepts of ‘Teaching Away’ and ‘Commercial Success’

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) yesterday concluded that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB’s) decision finding certain claims of Chemours’ patents obvious was not supported by substantial evidence and that the Board erred in its analysis of objective indicia of nonobviousness. As such, the CAFC reversed the decisions.

Pardon Me, But What Is the Point of Deciding Whether or Not a Reference ‘Teaches Away’?

“Teaching away” is a concept important to obviousness analysis under U.S. patent law. “Teaching away” basically bears upon the issue of motivation to combine elements in a manner set out by a patent claim, and such motivation is relevant to obviousness analysis but not to anticipation analysis: would one skilled in the art have had reason (or motivation) to put the known elements in the arrangement that the inventor has claimed? In a sense, “teaching away” is an anti-motivation, as it weighs against such an arrangement…. The question I propose to address is: Does the jurisprudence concerning “teaching away”—particularly the jurisprudence pertaining to whether a reference does or does not “teach away”—make any sense? And if not, what ought to replace it?

Teaching Away Requires Discouragement or Implying the Combination Would Not Work

Michael Meiresonne (“Meiresonne”) appealed from the final inter partes review (“IPR”) decision of the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”). The Board held that certain claims of the underlying patent were unpatentable as obvious… The Court stated that neither prior art reference said or implied that combining their teachings, especially for the “rollover viewing area” would be “‘unreliable,’ ‘misleading,’ ‘wrong,’ or ‘inaccurate,’ and which might lead one of ordinary skill in the art to discard” the combination. Thus, the references did not discourage a person of ordinary skill in the art from making the combination.

Teaching Away Insufficient to Overcome Motivation to Combine References

While Dome’s argument against obviousness based on Tanaka teaching away was plausible, it was not sufficient to overcome the district court’s factual findings that a person of ordinary skill would have been motivated to combine the identified prior art to arrive at the claimed invention. Accordingly, the Federal Circuit affirmed.