Anticipation Requires All Elements To Be Arranged Or Combined In The Same Way

In a suit involving two patents for secure internet credit card transaction processing, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit clarified that in order to anticipate a claimed invention a prior art reference must not only disclose all elements of the claim within the four corners of the document, but must also disclose those elements arranged or combined in the same way as in the claim. Net MoneyIN, Inc. v. VeriSign et al., Case No. 07-1565 (Fed. Cir., Oct. 20, 2008) (Linn, J.).

The plaintiff, Net MoneyIN, founded by inventor and Arizona patent attorney Mark Ogram, brought suit in 2001 against a dozen competitors in the internet credit card processing field. The defendants' key prior art reference was a 1995 working paper entitled "Internet Keyed Payments Protocol" (the iKP reference) that was published by the Internet Engineering Task Force and IBM. The iKP reference provides two example protocols for the flow of a customer's credit card information,