Sleeve Patent Personal View | Week 5

For this post, I will be discussing my personal view related to the anticipation and obviousness of these patents. Overall, I will be discussing the issues related to the invalidity, priority date, anticipation and obviousness.

Before we start, I think it is important to define anticipation and obviousness (as learned in class).

When we are talking about obviousness in regards to patents, an invention will only be patented if it is not obvious or trivial. If it is either of those things then the patent will not be issued. In order to be patented, it must be non-obvious, meaning that someone who is an expert in that field can say if the invention is innovative and expands and deviates from pervious inventions. Therefore, if there are little or insignificant differences between one product and the next, it will prevent it from being patented.

In regards to anticipation, it means that the patent and the innovation must be novel. If others know about the item or technology you are trying to patent, then the patent has the potential to be denied.

While I was reading the different patents on the sleeves of coffee cups, I did not realize the amount of innovation that takes place. It was super interesting to see the development and transition of these sleeves from the mid 1900's to today.

I feel like the air gaps discussed in the first patent I looked at were non-obvious. Someone who did not study insulation would have not thought to create air gaps to overall increase insulation. These air gaps overall increase the efficiency of insulation. However, it is important to note that as there became more sleeve inventions, there seemed to only be minor changes to the sleeve involving air gaps. Some may argue that there is no anticipation because people already know about it, but I feel that is it still useful because it made a significant impact.

In regards to the thermal coffee cup, we have seen this used mostly everywhere. The initial drawings of the cup have changed over time but the increased portability that this patent and invention provided at the time were very novel. Another patent was the glue on dot adhesives and syntactic foam- again I believe that this satisfies as non-obvious since someone with a more technical background would have some sort of knowledge in the best way to construct these sleeves.

Lastly, the patent I found to be most interesting was the temperature indication sleeve. I believe that this is the most novel and non-obvious of all of the patens we looked at. The only thing is that there many be some difficulty in cost and that it is so disposable. However, I am curious to see how this plays out in the future. Overall, most of these patents make sense- some make rather small improvements than others but all seem to serve a new, innovative valuable purpose. Thanks for reading!