What is the relationship between commercial success and nexus in patent law?
In patent law, commercial success can be used as evidence of non-obviousness, but it must have a nexus to the claimed invention. The MPEP states, ‘If commercial success is due to an element in the prior art, no nexus exists.’ ‘If the feature that creates the commercial success was known in the prior art, the success is not pertinent.’
(MPEP 716.01(b))
This means that for commercial success to be considered as evidence of non-obviousness, it must be directly related to the novel aspects of the claimed invention, not to features that were already known in the prior art. The success should be attributable to the unique characteristics of the invention as claimed.
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