On appeal of a PTAB decision finding all claims in a patent directed to compressing video files unpatentable, the Federal Circuit clarified two issues. This post considers the first clarified issue – what is required for a reference to be considered a printed publication for the purposes of an IPR?
In M&K Holdings v. Samsung Electronics (No. 2020-1160), the patent owner argued that several cited references did not qualify as printed publications, and thus could not be used as the basis for finding unpatentability in an IPR. Although the references were available on an industry group’s website, the patent owner argued the references were not publicly accessible, and thus could not be considered printed publications, because the references were not easily found on the website. Instead of having a single intuitive search page, a user needed to click through various links to get to the references.