Dazed and Conflated: Federal Circuit Clarifies “Motivation to Combine” Requirement under Section 103 in Intelligent Bio-Systems v. Illumina Cambridge
May 31st, 2016 by Jon Schuchardt | News | Recent News & Articles |
Like most other high-school students, I struggled with SAT vocabulary. Let’s face it, even voracious readers rarely encounter “susurration,” “verisimilitude,” or “eleemosynary.” Apparently, however, no 10th grader could hope to enter college without understanding them. I therefore cringed to read “conflate” in the Federal Circuit’s decision in Intelligent Bio-Systems v. Illumina Cambridge (decided May 9, 2016). According to Webster’s (not so) New Collegiate Dictionary (1977), “conflate” can mean “to bring together” or “fuse.” However, it can also mean “to confuse.” Yet another meaning is “to combine (as two readings of a text) into a composite whole.” Confused, I turned to Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition (1990), but alas, “conflate” appears to have no special meaning in the law.