Because prior art described a method that could execute an application on one computer server, it should have been obvious that the method could be applied to multiple servers.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board erred when it found that several claims of a patent describing the remote application of a computer application were not invalidated by the doctrine of collateral estoppel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The court, in granting a partial victory to Google over a patent-holding adversary, emphasized that where prior art described an application that could be executed on a single server, an artisan “would have found it obvious” to host that application on multiple servers (Google LLC v. Hammond Development International, Inc., December 8, 2022, Moore, K.).
Case date: 08 December 2022
Case number: No. 21-2218
Court: United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
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