Routine modifications that are a part of adapting an existing system to the Internet do not render the adaptations nonobvious. (See also, Western Union Co. v. MoneyGram Payment Sys., Inc., 626 F.3d 1361, 1370 (Fed. Cir. 2010), holding the claimed system of Internet-based money transfer to be obvious, for the prior art money transfers were simply implemented by a newer electronic method that had become commonplace.)
Background / Facts: The patents here relate to electronic commerce, where a merchant’s products are offered and purchased online through computers interconnected by a network. The claims are directed to various aspects thereof, including “shopping cart” claims, “hypertext statement” claims, and “session identifier” claims. The prior art at issue is largely directed to closed, intranet systems that attempted to provide e-commerce before the days of the internet.
Issue(s): Whether applying internet protocol transactions to otherwise established business methods of e-commerce is obvious.
Holding(s): Yes. “Precedent agrees with Newegg that a person of ordinary skill could have adapted the CompuServe order command to known browser capabilities when these capabilities became commonplace, and that it was obvious to do so.” The court noted that it has held in other cases that “conducting previously known methods through an Internet web browser was obvious because it amounted to no more than applying the use of the Internet to existing electronic processes at a time when doing so was commonplace.” The court latched on to various statements from Newegg’s expert witnesses explaining that “that the CompuServe Mall did not employ hypertext or URLs because it pre-dated the Internet and did not use the tools of the World Wide Web, but ‘[a]nyone who could get access to the text in a transaction record would understand how to use html to present that information at a variety of levels of details.’”