Is it patentable?

May 30

You be the patent examiner.

Case #7 - Analogous art

The Samurai 360 is “The Knife That Rolls.”

A patent examiner who sees this would probably think of a rolling pizza cutter. The difference you’d rely on is the handle, which doubles as a food scraper. To fill in this detail, the examiner might draw attention to a buzzsaw. These often have handles that are intimately associated with blade guards.
On the other hand, this is a kitchen tool. A buzzsaw is a carpentry tool. They live in different aisles at Home Depot. So the question that arises is, “Are these fields so many aisles apart that a kitchen tool designer would never think to look at carpentry tools?”
This a dicey defense.
After all, there are many ways to slice and dice fields of technology. Instead of “kitchen tool” and “carpentry tool,” an examiner could say that they are both in the field of “rotary cutting tools.”
Part of the legal test is whether the buzzsaw’s guards were “reasonably pertinent” to the problem faced by the inventor.

But how is the examiner to know what problem the inventor was facing? The only clues are in the patent application. Fortunately, this is under your control.

So if the application calls that handle a “handle,” then an examiner might say that you were solving the problem of safety.

That could draw in the buzzsaw.

But if you call it a “food scraper” that doubles as a handle, you could say that carpentry tools aren’t where people go when thinking of food scraping. Then there’s more of a chance.

Are the knife’s features reasonably pertinent to the problem faced by the inventor?

You be the examiner: is it patentable?

Disclaimer:

The O&R “Is it patentable?” blog is educational and provides general information about patent law. It provides no legal advice or conclusions. O&R uses publicly available information about the products described in these posts and has no relationship with the manufacturers, sellers, or distributors of these products. Reading this blog and participating in voting on the case studies does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and O&R.