In its recent In re Floyd opinion, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a decision by Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to reject a design applicant’s priority claim to an earlier utility filing for failing to adequately support the claimed design, while simultaneously finding that those same disclosures in the utility filing anticipated the claimed design.

Background

On January 23, 2016, Applicant Bonnie Floyd filed a utility patent application claiming a cooling blanket with ventilated openings along a matrix of sealed compartments. The utility application disclosed figures of cooling blankets in six-by-six and six-by-four arrays.

Three years later, on March 27, 2019, Floyd applied for a design patent claiming the ornamental design of a cooling blanket with rectan

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