"Obviousness" Hits the Slot Machines

Bally Gaming Inc. may be wishing that it hadn’t taken a gamble on suing International Game Technology (IGT) for infringing a patent that covers Bally’s Wheel of Fortune slot machine. In September, Judge Edward Reed in the U.S. district court in Reno applied last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in KSR v. Teleflex to grant summary judgment to IGT. He declared Bally’s patent for a “motorized wheel indicator” (dial) invalid on grounds of obviousness and struck another blow against simple mechanical inventions. “Simply utilizing a wheel or dial instead of a reel in a slot machine was not novel in the least,” Judge Reed wrote in his opinion. “The notion that a spinning object may represent the outcome of a game is as rudimentary as the children’s game Spin the Bottle.”

The gambling industry is just one of the latest battlefields as KSR continues to work its way through the patent system. At the Patent and Trademark Office, more patent applications have been rejected on grounds of obviousness, and the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences is affirming more rejections than before. According to an analysis by Harold Wegner of Foley & Lardner of 108 cases in ten days at the BPAI in September, KSR was cited in 61 percent of obviousness opinions.