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It was long used as a basis for rejecting claims,[1] but in recent years the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has disapproved of its use.
Or digitized information (the printed matter), such as a jpeg file representative of the Mona Lisa, might be encoded in an EPROM memory chip as substrate.
A computer program (the printed matter) might be encoded in a computer-readable medium such as a hard disk (the substrate)—and thus be the subject of a so-called Beauregard claim.
However, USPTO personnel need not give patentable weight to printed matter absent a new and unobvious functional relationship between the printed matter and the substrate.Examples where such a functional relationship is present include inventions in which "indicia on a measuring cup perform the function of indicating volume within that measuring cup" and in which " a hatband places a string of numbers in a certain physical relationship to each other such that a claimed algorithm is satisfied due to the physical structure of the hatband...."[13] Examples where such a functional relationship is absent include inventions in which "a product merely serves as a support for printed matter," e.g., "a hatband with images displayed on the hatband but not arranged in any particular sequence" or "a deck of playing cards having images on each card.