Fed Circuit cancels B/E patent for ‘common sense’ aircraft design
C&D Zodiac has scored a patent victory over rival B/E Aerospace in a dispute over technology designed to free up space on aircraft.
In a decision issued Friday, June 26, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that a B/E patent was invalid as obvious to a person of ordinary skill in aircraft design.
The patent covered a design featuring contoured walls which can “reduce or eliminate the gaps and volumes of space required between lavatory enclosures and adjacent structures”.
C&D successfully filed for an inter partes review (IPR) of the patent at the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which ruled that the patent was obvious.
C&D cited prior art which it argued disclosed the patented invention. The prior art (referred to in the judgment as “Betts”) describes the wall of an aeroplane bathroom, designed with two recesses to make room for a passenger seat.
The design accommodates for the tilted backrest of a passenger seat, requiring more space between the seat and the wall of a bathroom.
The PTAB found that this design was an “obvious solution to a known problem”, and not patentable.
B/E appealed to the Federal Circuit but was unable to convince the court to reverse the PTAB’s decision.
“The prior art yields a predictable result, the ‘second recess,’ because a person of skill in the art would have applied a variation of the first recess and would have seen the benefit of doing so,” read yesterday’s judgment.
B/E claimed there were holes in Zodiac’s evidence that didn’t account for the innovation of a second recess.
But the Federal Circuit agreed that a second recess would have been “common sense” to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
It also reiterated that the benchmark was a person of “ordinary creativity, not an automaton”.
“Common sense teaches that familiar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and in many cases a person of ordinary skill will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle,” the judgment said.
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