Drafting tips: Patenting two-of-a-kind if one-of-a-kind is known

Case #12 - Glove lights

The road to patentability for these finger-mounted lights leads right past the Croc-mounted lights that we looked at in April. It also leads past headlamps and the like.

You could claim the idea of having two lights instead of just one. But examiners are on to this. They often say, “If one is obvious, then so are two or more.”

This is actually a good point. A thing can only be new once in the course of human history. It’s hard to think of why just mass producing a thing isn’t obvious once the thing itself is known. 

So if you are going to claim an invention for what amounts to “two of a kind,” there had better be some way to articulate something interesting about how they cooperate to give something more than their sum. The keyword examiners look for is “synergy.” 

In this case, the word “articulate” is itself the clue. These lights happen to be mounted to articulating structures, namely one’s fingers. This means that they can point in different directions.

We might still have to distinguish the 1948 “Tucker Torpedo.” An examiner could say it’s obvious to duplicate its sole steerable headlight. But the resulting pair would still move together, like your eyes. In contrast, these finger-mounted lights can point in different directions with two degrees-of-freedom each: azimuth (left to right) and elevation (up and down). That’s not remotely true of even a pair of headlights or footlights.

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