Assignment 5B: Anticipation & Obviousness of the Coffee Sleeve Patent(s)

In this blog post, I will talk about the level of anticipation and obviousness of these sleeve patents. First, let's define these two terms:

1. Anticipation occurs when someone has known about or used the invention before the patent applicant applies for a patent. The act of anticipation means that the patent applicant will be rejected and not be granted a patent.
• The presence of anticipation is thus the lack of novelty.
• The obviousness standard prevents the patenting of relatively insignificant differences between the invention and the prior art
2. Obviousness is defined as an insufficient difference from what has been used or described before that a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention would find it obvious to make the change. 

As all of these patents seem to cover the same invention. However, according to Wikipedia, the coffee sleeve was patented by Jay Sorensen in 1993, by the name of Java Jacket (JJ for the purposes of this review). This patent, US5425497 A, is actually NOT one of the patents that our professor assigned us to analyze. Interestingly enough, the priority date in 1993 makes it the second-oldest patent filing in the list of 8 that we were assigned to analyze. 

Anyways, now that we have a reference point, we can go about determining the anticipation and obviousness of the other patents. I have removed the patent titles (you can visit my 5A post if you want the reference number) and grouped certain patents together:

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1. This is the first coffee-related patent and is certainly novel and different from the JJ, as this is basically a cup for a cup.
2. As this was the first of its kind, it is definitely non-obvious.

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1. These above inventions are very similar to the JJ, but use different material and construction. They also argue to be economical and environmentally friendly.
2. As these seem to only differ from the JJ in respects to materials and appearance, then they are very obvious.

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1. These above inventions offer unique capabilities beyond the typical coffee sleeve. The first empowers the barista, the second scientifically measures the temperature of the liquid, and the last prevents spillage of liquid from reaching the customer.
2. These inventions offer different capabilities, so they should be considered non-obvious because they use technology generally considered outside this field.