In re DiStefano
The U.S. Court of Appeals to the Federal Circuit addressed the
obscure "printed matter doctrine," concluding that a
claim limitation should be considered as printed matter only if the
claim pertains exclusively to the content of information. In re
DiStefano, Case No. 15-1453 (Fed. Cir., Dec. 17, 2015) (Prost,
C.J.).
Up on appeal for the second time, following a remand of the
original anticipation rejection of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office Board of Appeals (Board), the Federal Circuit this time
addressed the Board's application of the printed matter
doctrine. At issue in this case is inventor DiStefano's patent
on a method for designing web pages. The Board's analysis
focused on a limitation reciting "selecting a first element
from a database including web assets provided to the user interface
from outside the user interface by the user" (the
"selecting limitation"). The Board found that the
recitation of selecting elements from a database
