Appeal 2007-0896
Application 09/731,019
1 products, and would have understood from Salas the importance of Salas’
2 teaching of one vote per voter in designing Epinion’s voting.
3 14. A display of reviews is non-functional descriptive material.
4 15. Thus, claim 1 is directed toward voting on a review of non-functional
5 descriptive material.
6
7 PRINCIPLES OF LAW
8 In order to determine whether a prima facie case of obviousness has been
9 established, we considered the three factors set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co.,
10 383 U.S. 1, 17 (1966), viz., (1) the scope and content of the prior art; (2) the
11 differences between the prior art and the claims at issue; and (3) the level of
12 ordinary skill in the art. We also considered the requirement, as recently re-stated
13 in In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 78 USPQ2d 1329 (Fed. Cir. 2006), for a showing of a
14 “teaching, suggestion, or motivation” to modify or combine the prior art teaching.
15 As to this test, the court explained,
16 The ‘motivation-suggestion-teaching’ test asks not merely what the
17 references disclose, but whether a person of ordinary skill in the art,
18 possessed with the understandings and knowledge reflected in the
19 prior art, and motivated by the general problem facing the inventor,
20 would have been led to make the combination recited in the claims….
21 From this it may be determined whether the overall disclosures,
22 teachings, and suggestions of the prior art, and the level of skill in the
23 art – i.e., the understandings and knowledge of persons having
24 ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention – support the legal
25 conclusion of obviousness.
26
27 441 F.3d at 988, 78 USPQ2d at 1337 (internal citations omitted). It is not just
28 the explicit teachings of the art itself, but also the understandings and knowledge
7
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