The plaintiff appealed arguing that there was insufficient evidence of a motivation to combine the two pieces of prior art. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decision. The Federal Circuit held that the O’Brien patent disclosed all the claims of the plaintiffs patent and Nelson was merely used to demonstrate that the O’Brien patent was a type of dictionary encoder. Because a person of ordinary skill in the art would have turned to a well-known data compression textbook, to better understand compression algorithms in the O’Brien patent, there was no need to demonstrate a motivation.