Perfect Web Technologies, Inc. v. InfoUSA, Inc.
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
587 F.3d 1324 (2009)
Perfect Web Technologies (plaintiff) held a bulk-email patent whose final step simply repeated three earlier claimed steps (matching a recipient profile, sending bulk emails, and calculating successful deliveries) if the initial attempt didn't meet a target delivery number. In litigation against InfoUSA (defendant), the district court found that a person of ordinary skill in email marketing needed only a high school education and modest experience, that prior art and Perfect Web's own patent specification already showed the first three steps were known, and that the final repeat-until-successful step was simply the obvious next move if the target wasn't hit initially, granting InfoUSA summary judgment that the patent was invalid for obviousness. Perfect Web appealed.
Whether a court, in determining whether a patent is invalid for obviousness, may consider the common sense of a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention.