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Realtime Data LLC’s patent describing a system for lossless data compression is invalid because its claims are obvious due to the prior art, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held January 10, 2019. Realtime Data, LLC v. Iancu, Fed. Cir., 2018-1154, 1/10/19.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s holding that the claims, which involve data compression through a process known as “dictionary encoding,” were covered by a prior invention and a well-known data compression textbook. Realtime argued that the board wrongly found that a person ordinarily skilled in the art would have been motivated to combine the two pieces of prior art, however, the Federal Circuit disagreed, finding that the prior art references were “well-known” and that there was enough evidence to support the conclusion that a person ordinarily skilled in the art would turn to the prior art when researching compression algorithms.