Patent Analysis Part 2

Personal Patent Analysis

In this post I provide my own personal insight on the anticipation and obviousness of the beverage sleeve patent list.

To recap, for a patent to be approved, it must be deemed non-obvious. Obvious as a term means the patent must not be obviously related to previous inventions before it, and must show a significant improvement to be patentable as a separate invention. In my personal opinion, very few of these show significant improvement to warrant its own patent and I will explain one. Apart from the thermal coffee cup which I believe is unique enough to warrant its own patent,  all of the patents regarding sleeves have the same functionality and structure.

From the initial patent in 2001 to the most recent in 2010, you find the majority of claims are similar and unchanged across the years; specification of a conical shape, flexibility of the sleeve, top and bottom hole for the coffee cup, insulator properties. From my own observation, the only major difference I could discern over the years was the change from paper material to silicon like substitute, to improve reuse and washability, and the change to a clear sleeve as opposed to solid. Are these two factors non-obvious enough to warrant their own patent? 

I will first address the change in material. While newly discovered alloys and chemicals are patentable, they are so because they were previously a undiscovered compound that was discovered after years of painstaking research. However once patented, very rarely are they allowed to be repatented for a specific use. There is no such patent to use copper in electric wires as well as pennies in US currency. The same logic can be applied here. Simply because a already discovered material, is used in a already patented invention, does not make it a completely new invention in my opinion while the fundamental use of the product has not changed. I would disagree.