Partners Paul Stewart and Michael Friedland authored, “The Fed. Circ. In July: A ‘Prior Art’ Decision to Know”, part of a monthly series published in Law360 on noteworthy Federal Circuit opinions from the previous month. In this month’s article, Stewart and Friedland provide insights on LG Electronics Inc. v. Immervision, Inc.
In the LG Electronics case, Stewart and Friedland write, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision that addressed the circumstances under which a purported disclosure in a prior art reference may be corrected or disregarded on the ground that the purported disclosure was merely the result of a typographical or similar error. In this case, the Court permitted erroneous prior art text to be disregarded when the error was not discovered for 20 years, and then only in litigation when an expert witness reconstructed the prior art embodiment and engaged in extensive analysis to uncover the error.
The LG Electronics decision, the authors write, is arguably broader than the only relevant authority identified by the Federal Circuit – the 1970 decision of the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals in In re Yale.