Affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment of invalidity, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that a common-sense variation of known technology is unpatentable.   Odom v. Microsoft Corp., Case Nos. 11-1160 (Fed. Cir., May 4, 2011) (Lourie, J.). 

In August 2008 James Odom brought suit against Microsoft, alleging infringement of its patent directed to both a method for manipulating groups of “tools” in “toolbars” commonly found in computer software applications, as well as to the ability to use the divider to hide or display selected tools, by Microsoft’s Office 2007, a suite of office productivity software.  During the litigation, Odom’s counsel withdrew from the case and, failing to retain new counsel, Odom moved to dismiss his claims without prejudice.  The district court granted Odom’s request to dismiss but declined to dismiss Microsoft’s declaratory judgment counterclaims.  Microsoft subsequently moved for summary judgment of non-infringement and invalidity.

The district court granted Microsoft’s motions for summary judgment, holding that the asserted claims of the patent were invalid for obviousness and not infringed by Office 2007.   In so finding, the court stated that the asserted claims presented “one of the clearest” cases of obviousness that had come before it because Odom had simply “cobbled together various pieces of what was already out there in a manner … that would have been obvious to anyone skilled in the art at the time of the invention.”  Odom appealed. 

On appeal, Odom argues that the district court erred in its obviousness analysis by looking at separate pieces of the claimed invention rather than the invention as a whole, by impermissibly applying hindsight in determining obviousness, and argued that the manipulatable sections of the composite toolbar disclosed in the prior art are very different from the claimed tool groups.  The Federal Circuit disagreed.  The Court found that user-manipulatable toolbars (which can be customizing according to user preferences and which include groups of command buttons’ or toolbars) were known in prior art at the time the patent in suit was filed.  The Court found that the only difference between the prior art and the patent in suit was that the groups of tools claimed in the patent are on a single toolbar.  Citing KSR, the Court held that this difference “is an insignificant advance.”

Since it would have been a trivial change for a person of skill in the art designing such alterable tool groups to add an indicator that could indicate any altered condition of the tool group, the Federal Circuit concluded that the district court did not err in determining that the manner in which patent divides up toolbars into groups, and the claimed manipulation of tool groups, would have been a common sense variation for a person of skill in the art.

The Federal Circuit also rejected Odom’s arguments of secondary considerations and reiterated that weak secondary considerations generally do not overcome a strong prima facie case of obviousness.