Appeal 2007-1593
Application 10/462,972
cards and card holder to the customer would not have been a great leap for
one of ordinary skill in the art.5 Moreover,
[c]ommon sense teaches . . . that familiar items
may have obvious uses beyond their primary
purposes, and in many cases a person of ordinary
skill will be able to fit the teachings of multiple
patents together like pieces of a puzzle. . . . A
person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary
creativity, not an automaton.
KSR Int’l., 127 S.Ct. at 1742, 82 USPQ2d at 1397. In this instance, it would
have been readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art that a
personalized card, such as a business card or non-adhesive address label
system, as taught by Alden, would have other obvious uses beyond its
primary (disclosed) purpose as a mailing label and that one such use would
be identification of the recipient or owner of the container on which the card
is secured or identification of the contents therein. Moreover, the
implementation of a non-adhesive card label system of the type taught by
Alden on Masoud’s container would have involved merely providing a
depressed panel and retaining flanges on the lid 102 of Masoud’s card holder
and, thus, would not have been beyond the capabilities of one of ordinary
skill in the art. In light of the above, we conclude that the modification of
Masoud’s card holder to provide a plurality of card securing members on the
lid thereof is merely a predictable variation of Masoud’s card holder.
5 In this regard, we take official notice of the practice of attaching one copy
of the prepared business cards to the container delivered to the customer to
both associate the container with the customer and to permit immediate
inspection of the business card by the customer for accuracy.
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