by Dennis Crouch
The Federal Circuit's recent decision in Virtek Vision International ULC v. Assembly Guidance Systems, Inc. focuses on the motivation to combine aspect of the obviousness analysis. The court's ruling emphasizes that the mere existence of prior art elements is not sufficient to render a claimed invention obvious; rather, there must be a clear reason or rationale for a person of ordinary skill in the art to combine those elements in the claimed manner. In the case, the IPR petitioner failed to articulate that reasoning and thus the PTAB's obviousness finding was improper.
