On January 6, 2005, the Federal Circuit issued Teleflex Inc. v. KSR International Co., 119 Fed.Appx. 282, 288 (Fed. Cir. 2005), a seemingly innocuous opinion authored by Judge Schall and designated under Federal Circuit Rule 47.6 as “not citable as precedent.”

The decision vacated a grant of summary judgment of invalidity based on obviousness on the grounds that the district court had not made sufficient findings to support such a determination and thus genuine issues of material fact remained.

It remanded the case to the district court to apply “the correct standard [for a finding of obviousness]” and defined this standard to be that a district court must “make specific findings showing a teaching, suggestion, or motivation to combine prior art teachings in the particular manner claimed by the patent.”

When KSR filed its petition for certiorari, it opened what is potentially a Pandora’s Box of problems for the future of obviousness determinations and potentially threatened the validity of hundreds of thousands of issued patents.

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