Patently-O has up a PDF of the KSR v Teleflex ruling (which, by the way, was unanimous). Basically, the court says that, while the original precedents provide adequate guidance for obviousness, the Federal Circuit has interpreted that guidance too narrowly, arguing that “Rigid preventative rules that deny recourse to common sense are neither necessary under, nor consistent with, this Courts case law.”
Probably the passage in the opinion that resonates the most with the kinds of issues that come up in Bb v. D2L and are likely to come up in any similar edupatent disputes is the following:
When there is a design need or market pressure to solve a problem and there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill in the art has good reason to pursue the known options within his or her technical grasp. If this leads to the anticipated success, it is likely the product not of innovation but of ordinary skill and common sense.
In other words, if a problem is fairly well known in the market, and if there are a fairly small number of fairly well-known methods for solving similar problems, you can’t get a patent just by being the first to apply the known solution to the known problem.
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