In re Klopfenstein
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
380 F.3d 1345 (2004)
Carol Klopfenstein and John Brent (plaintiffs) displayed printed slides describing their double-extrusion cholesterol-lowering food process on poster boards at a cereal-chemists' conference for two and a half days, and again a month later at a university station, without any disclaimer against reproduction and without ever photographing, distributing, or indexing the slides; they applied for a patent in 2000, more than a year after these displays, and the PTO denied the application under the printed-publication bar of 35 U.S.C. §102(b), a decision the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences affirmed. The plaintiffs appealed, arguing their poster couldn't be a "printed publication" since it was never distributed, copied, or indexed.
Whether an inventor's public display of an invention must be distributed, copied, or indexed to qualify as a "printed publication" for purposes of the statutory printed-publication bar to patentability.