By John L. Rogitz of Rogitz & Associates
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Inventorship: Nartron Corp. v. Schukra U.S.A., Inc., no. 2008-1363 reverses S/J of dismissal for failure to name as plaintiff an alleged co-inventor even though other inventors admitted that alleged co-inventor suggested a vehicle seat "extender" in one of the dependent claims, because alleged co-inventor admitted that the extender was in the prior art and hence the alleged co-inventor did nothing more than provide the other inventors with well-known principles and explain to them the state of the art; including the extender was thus the basic exercise of ordinary skill in the art without inventive act; this is not a case of suggesting a non-obvious combination of prior art elements because "[t]here is not, and could not be, any claim that the addition of the extender here was anything but obvious."
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Court-Appointed Experts: In Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. v. O2 Micro Int'l Ltd., nos. 2008-1128, -1136, while acknowledging that while court-appointed experts under Rule 706(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence are "rare" and raise "inherent predicaments", the CAFC holds that under Ninth Circuit law it was not an abuse of discretion for the trial court to appoint an expert to testify as to the obviousness of a claim to what was characterized as complex DC-AC conversion circui...
