Error Apparent? Federal Circuit Tackles Obvious Errors In Prior Art

In LG Electronics v. Immervision, the Federal Circuit clarified the standard for evaluating whether a prior art reference includes an obvious typographical error. See 39 F.4th 1364, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2022). Under this standard, established 50 years ago in In re Yale, a prior art disclosure that relies on a typographical error is not invalidating if that error would have been apparent (i.e. obvious) to a person of ordinary skill in the art ("POSA"). See id. at 1371-72.

At the PTAB, LG Electronics ("LG") challenged Immervision's patent, which claimed a method of compressing and expanding different parts of a photo to improve resolution. See id. at 1366. LG's prior art patent ("Tada") did not expressly disclose the compression and expansion limitations, but it included data ("Table 5") that LG's expert relied on to opine that Tada was invalidating prior art. See id. at 1367. However, after analyzing Tada and its priority application, Immervision's expert identified a