U.S. Supreme Court to Consider Obviousness Standard

On June 26, 2006, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc where the Federal Circuit concluded that there was insufficient motivation to combine references describing solutions to different problems. Links to the briefs, and more, are available from Dennis Crouch's Patently-O Blog.

On June 22, 2006 the Supreme Court dismsissed (per curium) as improvidently granted its writ of certiorari in Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. where the question briefed was "[w]hether a method patent . . . directing a party simply to ‘correlate’ test results can validly claim a monopoly over a basic scientific relationship . . . such that any doctor necessarily infringes the patentmerely by thinking about the relationship after looking at a test result."