In re Lister
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
583 F.3d 1307 (Fed. Cir. 2009)
Dr. Richard Lister (plaintiff) registered a golf-method manuscript with the U.S. Copyright Office in 1994, which kept a copy available for public inspection and searchable through two databases; when Lister applied to patent the method in 1996, his own disclosure statement said database information "comes directly from the Library of Congress," but neither Lister nor the government presented evidence about the specific dates the manuscript became searchable or the databases' general cataloging practices. The USPTO rejected Lister's application on novelty grounds as a publicly accessible printed publication, the Board affirmed, and Lister appealed.
Whether a manuscript registered with the Copyright Office, and theoretically searchable through databases, is shown to have been publicly accessible more than one year before a patent application when no evidence establishes when or how those databases actually cataloged the relevant information.