By: Mel R. Quintos

The “printed matter” rule dates back to the 1869 case of Ex parte Abraham, but did not fully develop until the case of In re Russell in 1931 where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) and its predecessor court “consistently limited the printed matter rule to matter claimed for its communicative content.” In In re Russell, the claimed improvements in indexing of names in directories were held to be in line with a predecessor court, which held that:

• the mere arrangement of printed matter on a sheet or sheets of paper, in book form or otherwise, does not constitute a new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvements thereof

In the CAFC case of In re Distefano, decided on December 17, 2015, the invention is a method for allowing an individual to design a web page without requiring the individual to “learn HTML or to interact extensively with a web page designer.” The invention includes a graphical user interface composed of a primary display and an overlaid design plate, the overlaid design plate having: (1) menu buttons for editing the website, and (2) a design place for displaying and editing “web assets” (Java applets, scripts, stock art, digital art, background images, video, text, etc.), which the individual can edit and drag from the design plate onto the website. —click here to read more—