By William Carroll ( November 6, 2017, 1:13 PM EST) -- Few patent law doctrines create as much confusion as inherent obviousness. On the one hand, inherency is based on the principle that claiming a previously unknown function, property or result necessarily present in a known product or process does not confer patentability on a claim.[1] On the other hand, an obviousness analysis considers whether prior art teachings would lead a skilled artisan to the claimed invention. But obviousness "cannot be predicated on what is unknown," and unknown characteristics of the prior art do not constitute a teaching.[2] How then do the unknown, but inherent, characteristics of the prior art factor into an obviousness analysis? This article proposes a simple framework for unraveling inherency issues that arise in the context of obviousness....