By Francis C. Lynch ( December 21, 2016, 11:09 AM EST) -- An Oct. 19, 2016, article in Law360 detailed the many ways in which the Federal Circuit's en banc majority's decision on obviousness issues in Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. appears to be contrary to holdings in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc..[1]. This article focuses on the en banc majority's failure to discuss a long line of U.S. Supreme Court precedents which have consistently required that the obviousness of patents claiming combinations of known elements functioning as in the prior art be subject to special treatment, culminating in the principles articulated in KSR. The application of these principles requires an analysis, keyed to the predictability of the results of claimed inventions, which inherently accepts a higher risk of hindsight bias to avoid granting or enforcing patents that add nothing to the sum of useful knowledge (or withdraws what is already known) and, therefore, fail to satisfy the constitutional standard for patentability. The en banc Apple majority ignored these principles and, instead, justified treating motivation to combine and the significance of secondary considerations as fact issues for the jury in that case by relying on its own case law, based primarily on the need to avoid hindsight bias....