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Dissenting Fed Circuit Judge Says Nothing Obvious About Shredded Jerseys on Baseball Cards

By Eric Lipman

Back in my youth, I was a big baseball card collector. In fact, somewhere in my grandmother's basement in Queens, among the hundreds of bottles of expired salad dressing, there are still many boxes of little cardboard photos of overpaid athletes that I was foolish enough to believe might one day fund my kids' college education. None of them, though, look like this: That is, none of them have a little swatch of "game used jersey" embedded in them. It never would have occurred to me that such a card could be made. Then again, I'm not skilled in the art. According to two federal circuit judges, the idea to combine sports memorabilia and trading cards should have been obvious, and was thus not patentable. The case is Media Technologies Licensing v. Upper Deck, and here's the opinion (PDF). Gary Odom, over at Patent Prospector, doesn't buy it. He is persuaded by the strongly worded dissent of Judge Rader, who calls the prior art that forms the basis of the majority opinion -- including a Marilyn Monroe card with a diamond attached and a piece of a sheet supposedly slept on by John Lennon -- "wholly irrelevant" and expresses his...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on March 04, 2010 (boomark / email).