In re Foster
Court of Customs and Patent Appeals
343 F.2d 980 (1965)
Foster's patent application for a combination synthetic and natural rubber was rejected by the examiner, a rejection the Board of Appeals upheld, and Foster appealed to the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, raising whether prior art establishing obviousness only through a combination of multiple references, rather than a single anticipating reference, could still trigger the one-year statutory bar to patentability.
Whether, where the invention being claimed is not contained in a single prior art reference under 35 U.S.C. section 102(b) but is instead put in public possession through a combination of references under 35 U.S.C. section 103, those references may still serve as prior art that prevents a patent grant.