Written by: Mark Terry Today I came across a nice little Board of Patent Appeals case that outlines an additional tool that can be used to fight 102 anticipation rejections, especially when procuring software patents. Specifically, this case addresses a common situation: you receive a 102 rejection where the Examiner appears to have done a simple text search for each of your claim elements and found them all in disparate parts of one reference. The case of Ex parte Putnam (Appeal No. 2010-001668) involved a software process for migrating databases. The Patent Examiner found all of the elements of claim 1 in