PTAB Designates Two Decisions as Informative
Written October 16, 2019
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board designated two decisions as informative regarding design choice.
The first decision, Ex parte Spangler, Appeal No. 2018-003800 (Feb. 20, 2019), affirms the examiner’s obviousness rejection, which determined that claimed relative lengths and locations of two claimed components were a matter of obvious design choice because the specification did not suggest that the relative lengths or locations were critical to the claimed invention.
The second decision, Ex parte Maeda, Appeal No. 2010-009814 (Oct. 23, 2012), reverses the examiner’s obviousness rejection, which determined that the location of a claimed component of a manufacturing apparatus was a matter of obvious design choice because moving the component to the claimed location would result in a different function than shown in the prior art.
Learn more about these informative decisions on the USPTO website.