Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit overruled the four-decade-old Rosen-Durling framework and folded design-patent obviousness into the flexible Graham analysis used for utility patents. Design patents just became easier to challenge.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that the 'article of manufacture' for design-patent damages under § 289 can be a single component, not necessarily the entire end product sold to consumers.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit scrapped the separate point-of-novelty test for design-patent infringement and made the prior-art-informed ordinary observer the sole standard.
In the first design-patent case it ever heard, the Supreme Court rejected an expert-eye comparison and adopted the ordinary-observer test that still governs infringement more than 150 years later.
