In accordance with KSR’s mandate that “[a] person of ordinary skill is … a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton,” the court emphasized that “the obviousness inquiry must take account of the ‘routine steps’ that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.” Put another way, the obviousness inquiry “not only permits, but requires, consideration of common knowledge and common sense.” Thus, as here for example, further utilization of readily available information in a manner closely correlated with its intended purpose is merely an obvious, routine step that involves nothing more than common sense.
Background / Facts: The patent being asserted here is directed to the filtering of Internet search results by utilizing both content-based (e.g., text) and collaborative (e.g., other user results) filtering. Specifically, the asserted claims describe a filter system that combines content and collaborative data in filtering each “informon”—or information item—for relevance to a user’s query. The patentee does not dispute that the prior art disclosed hybrid content-based and collaborative filtering, or that it disclosed conventional “content-based filtering” in response to a query.
Issue(s): Whether it would have been obvious to use content and collaborative data together in filtering items for relevance to a query when filtering combined content-based and collaborative data.
Holding(s): Yes. “Very basic logic dictates that a user’s search query can provide highly pertinent information in evaluating the overall relevance of search results. … As [the expert testimony] explained, the query would be just ‘sitting there’ with the results of a search, and it would have been obvious to one skilled in the art ‘to keep around the query and use that also for filtering.’” Accordingly, “[b]ecause the query was readily available and closely correlated to the overall relevance of search results—and the prior art unequivocally disclosed hybrid content-based/collaborative filtering—retaining the query for use in filtering combined content and collaborative data was ‘entirely predictable and grounded in common sense.’”