Source: http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/213/301/case.html
Timestamp: 2013-05-24 08:23:39
Document Index: 496486999

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 4887', '§ 665', '§ 117', '§ 4887', '§ 4887', '§ 4887']

Leeds & Catlin Co. v. Victor Talking Machine Co. - 213 U.S. 301 (1909) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
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Case	U.S. Supreme CourtLeeds & Catlin Co. v. Victor Talking Machine Co., 213 U.S. 301 (1909)Leeds and Catlin Company v.Victor Talking Machine CompanyNo. 80Argued January 15, 18, 1909Decided April 19, 1909213 U.S. 301CERTIORARI TO THE CIRCUIT COURT OF
A combination which produces by the cooperation of its constituents the result specified in the manner specified is a true mechanical device, and a valid combination. Page 213 U. S. 302
The bill is in the usual form, and alleges the issuing of the patent and the existence of the necessary conditions thereof Page 213 U. S. 303 under the laws of the United States. It also alleges the transfer of title to the plaintiffs in the suit and the infringement of claims 5, 32, and 35 by the defendant, petitioner herein.
It is alleged that, before the invention was patented in the United States, the same was patented, or caused to be patented, by Emil Berliner in foreign countries, and that, by reason whereof, under § 4887 of the Revised Statutes of the United States, the letters patent in suit were limited to expire at the same time with said foreign patents and each of them. The numbers and dates of the foreign patents are given -- two in Great Britain, three in France, three in Germany, and one in Canada. They will be specifically referred to hereafter. And it is alleged that, in consequence thereof, the said letters patent of the United States have long since expired, and plaintiff is not entitled to any relief by injunction or other relief in equity, that a court of equity has no jurisdiction of the suit, and that plaintiff has an adequate remedy at law. A replication was filed to the answer. Page 213 U. S. 304
Upon the bill and certain supporting affidavits, an order to show cause against a preliminary injunction was issued, which, coming on to be heard upon such affidavits and other affidavits and exhibits, a preliminary injunction was granted. 146 F. 534. It was affirmed by the circuit court of appeals. 148 F. 1022. Page 213 U. S. 310
Upon this body of proof, formidable even in its quantity, and having no other elucidation than the arguments of counsel and Page 213 U. S. 311 some mechanical exhibits, presenting grave questions of fact, we are asked by petitioner to go beyond the action of the lower courts, and not only reverse them as to a preliminary injunction, but decide the case. If we should yield to this invocation and attempt a final decision, it would be difficult to say whether it would be more unjust to petitioner or to respondent.
In passing on the other foreign patents, the circuit court considered that the prior adjudications fortified the presumption of the validity of the patent in suit, and established its scope, Page 213 U. S. 312 and that the new matter introduced by petitioner did not repel the presumption or limit the extent of the patent. That the lower courts properly regarded the prior adjudications as a ground of preliminary injunction is established by the cases cited in Walker on Patents, §§ 665 et seq. See also Robinson on Patents, §§ 117 et seq. And, in that aspect, the question must be considered, and, so considering it, we may pass the defenses of anticipation, whether complete or partial, and the defense of infringement. These are, we have already said, questions of fact which we are not inclined to pass upon unaided by the judgments of the lower courts, made after a hearing on the merits.
In the old method the sound record was produced by vertical vibrations, either indenting a pliable material, by and in accordance with the sound waves along a helical or spiral line, as in Edison patents, or by like vibrations engraving a suitable material, by and in accordance with the sound waves, as in the Bell and Tainter patent. By both of these methods, there was produced a record consisting of a groove of varying depth -- that is, containing elevations and depressions corresponding to the sound waves which produced them. In the Berliner patents, the vibrations are made to inscribe a laterally undulating line in the general direction of a spiral. The line therefore is of even depth, the inequalities or sinuosities produced by the sound waves being upon its sides. By this method there is produced Page 213 U. S. 313 a sound record tablet, consisting of a flat disc of hard, resisting material, having in its surface inscribed a spiral groove of practically even depth but undulating laterally in accordance with the sound waves. The patent in suit describes and specifies the ways of making such record tablet, as do the prior patents the sound records of the respective patentees. Further description of the records, however, is not necessary, as we shall have with them but incidental concern.
"No. 5, the method Page 213 U. S. 314 of reproducing sounds from a record of the same which consists in vibrating a stylus and propelling the same along the record, substantially as described. No. 35 is a sound-producing apparatus, consisting of a traveling tablet having a sound record formed thereon and a reproducing stylus shaped for engagement with said record, and free to be vibrated and propelled by the same, substantially as described."
The affidavits describe not only the reproducer of the patent in suit, but also the recorder, and give details to the construction of both, and petitioner, in its briefs, elaborately traces Page 213 U. S. 315 the development of Berliner's ideas in comparison with the prior art through three stages, each of which, it is contended, "is represented by domestic and foreign patents, obtained or applied for, respectively, in 1887, 1888, and 1889-1892." Each stage, it is insisted, is claimed as an improvement upon the preceding stage, and all of them are but improvements upon the prior art. Berliner did not employ, it is said, any new principles in the reproduction of sound from a sound record, "the difference in the sound-reproducing machines employed by him and those of the prior art consisting of modifications of details of construction." And it is further contended that an analysis of the patent in suit demonstrates "that the improvements described and claimed related, first, to the recording of sound; and, second, to the reproducing of sound." It is impossible, counsel say, "to seriously contend that the essence of the improvements consist rather in the reproduction of sound than in the recording of sound." It is nevertheless argued that the lower courts so regarded the patent in suit, and by that error adjudged that the foreign patents did not embody Berliner's invention, and that therefore the patent in suit did not expire with them. Indeed, it is urged that, "in the face" of the
This is a misapprehension of the view of the courts below. They confine themselves, as it was proper to do, to the claims in suit and to the invention exhibited in them, and, in considering the relation of the patent in suit with foreign patents, they distinguished between what the circuit court denominates the "broad and basic invention" covered by those claims and the "minor part" shown in the foreign patents. Petitioner attempts to make the recording and reproduction of sounds essential parts of one invention, of which the claims are Page 213 U. S. 316 but parts. The purpose is to identify the invention of the patent with every one of the foreign patents, and bring the case under what is conceived to be the doctrine of Siemen v. Sellers, 123 U. S. 276.
"We have carefully compared the two patents, the English and American, and can see no essential difference between them. They describe the same furnace in all essential particulars. The English specification is more detailed, and the drawings are more minute and full; but the same thing is described in both. There is only one claim in the English patent, it is true. But that claim, under the English patent system, entitled the Page 213 U. S. 317 patentees to their entire invention, and is at least as broad and comprehensive as all four claims in the American patent."
"Any person who has invented or discovered any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful Page 213 U. S. 318 improvement thereof, . . . may . . . obtain a patent therefor."
But whether put in the same patent with the combination or made the subjects of separate patents, they are not identical with the combination. To become that, they must be united under the same cooperative law. Certainly, one element is not the combination, nor, in any proper sense, can it be regarded as a substantive part of the invention represented by the combination, and it can make no difference whether the element was always free or becomes free by the expiration of a prior patent, foreign or domestic. In making a combination, an inventor has the whole field of mechanics to draw from. This view is in accordance with the principles of the patent laws. It is in accordance with the policy of § 4887 of the Revised Page 213 U. S. 319 Statutes, which is urged against it. That policy is, as we have seen, that an American patent is not precluded by a foreign patent for the same invention, but, if a foreign patent be granted, an American patent is granted upon the condition that the "invention shall be free to the American people whenever, by reason of the expiration of the foreign patent, it becomes free to the people abroad." Bate Refrigerating Co. v. Sulzberger, 157 U. S. 1, 157 U. S. 36. And all of the provisions of the statutes are accommodated. Each invention is given the full period of seventeen years, which the statute prescribes for it. [Footnote 1] If limited at all, it can only be by a prior foreign patent identical with it. Nor can confusion result. Why should it? It does not result from analogous applications of the patent laws. Claims are independent inventions. One may be infringed, others not, and the redress of the patentee is limited to the injury he suffers, not by the abstract rights which have been granted him in other claims. One claim may be valid, all the rest invalid -- invalid for the want of some essential patentable attribute. But what is good remains and is unaffected by its illegal associates. In such cases, the patent does not stand or fall as a unity. If claims may be separable, as in the case of infringement of some and not of others -- if claims can be separable, though some are invalid -- may they not be separable when some of them have expired? Certainly confusion cannot arise in one case more than in the other. Confusion might result in such circumstances as were presented in Siemen v. Sellers, where it was sought to extend the principal invention -- indeed the only invention -- by the date of a mere formal improvement of it. In such case, as Page 213 U. S. 320 it was said, the patent "cannot be construed as running partly from one date and partly from another."
In the light of these principles, let us examine the foreign patents relied upon. Special stress is given to German patent No. 53,622 to Berliner, and it is contended that it expired before this suit was brought, and that the patent in suit expired with it. The patent refers to two others in which, it is said, there is described an apparatus for the recording of sound, and that "the present invention [that covered by the patent] relates to the instrument in the part of the apparatus performing the reproduction." The instrument is exhibited by a drawing, and is specifically described. Petitioner says that that instrument covered the most important part of the Berliner gramophone, and that Berliner, in his Franklin Institute lecture, specifically stated that, of the three principal features of the improvement of the patent in suit, the reproducer formed one. But granting that he did say so, and that it is so, the inquiry yet remains, is it identical with the invention of Claim 5 or Claim 35 of the patent in suit? It is not of Claim 5, for that is for a method, and a method is independent of the instruments employed to perform it. It is not of Claim 35, for that claim is for a combination, and one element is not the combination. Indeed, all of the elements are not. To be that -- to be identical with the invention of the combination -- they must be united by the same operative law. Of course, an element is a part, an essential part, of the combination, and enters as an operative agent in the performance of its functions. But this does not make it identical with the combination. It may be novel, patentable of itself, subject to its own special monopoly, or it may be free for everybody's use; but, whether free or not free, free when the combination was formed (invented) or became free, it is not identical with the combination. It follows, therefore, that the expiration of the German patent No. 53,622 for the reproducer did not affect the duration of the patent in suit so far as Claims 5 and 35 are concerned, even though such reproducer is made the subject of one of the claims of the patent in suit. To some Page 213 U. S. 321 extent, these remarks are applicable to all the foreign patents relied on by petitioner.
It is further contended that the patent in suit expired with the British, French, and German patents of November 8, 1887, to Berliner. These patents, it is contended, are for the "basic invention" covered by Claims 5 and 35 of the patent in suit. The patents are identical, and therefore we consider only the British patent. The reasoning by which this is attempted to be supported is somewhat circuitous. Among the publications referred to in petitioner's answer and introduced in evidence was one in the Electrical World for November 12, 1887, one published in the same paper, August 18, 1888, and a paper read by Berliner before the Franklin Institute, May 16, 1888. In these publications, there is description of the invention, and, in the paper read before the Franklin Institute, Berliner describes the genesis of his ideas and the ideas of others in the process of recording and reproducing sounds. He entered into a somewhat Page 213 U. S. 322detailed description of his invention, exhibited a machine, and gave an illustration of its powers, among others letting the audience "listen to some phonaulograms," which he said he had prepared within two weeks before in Washington. This was urged as a public use, but the circuit court decided that neither that lecture and exhibition nor the description in the Electrical World in 1887 constituted a public use within the meaning of the statutes. And the court also decided that the broad claims of the patent in suit were not made a part of the earlier application for patent No. 564,586, and that that omission, even when combined with such exhibition and publication, was not an abandonment and forfeiture of those claims. The circuit court of appeals did not discuss those questions or express an opinion upon them, but decided that the specifications in the application for patent No. 564,586, issued subsequently to the patent in suit, were broad enough to warrant the making of the claims in controversy (5 and 35), and that the second application could fairly be considered a continuation of the first, and antedated the alleged public use. If this be so, petitioner contends, the two patents must be treated as one patent, covering one invention, that described in No. 564,586, and, it is further contended, that as that invention was previously patented by the three foreign patents, the patent in suit expired with them. The reasoning is extremely technical, and we may adopt the answer made to it by the circuit court:
It would be a very strange application of § 4887 to hold that it covers what is omitted from a foreign patent as well as what is included in such patent. At any rate, whatever was the ruling Page 213 U. S. 323 in the prior suit, in the suit at bar, the circuit court and the circuit court of appeals both held that the inventions of Claims 5 and 35 of the patent in suit were not exhibited in the British patent, and that is so far a question of fact, pertains so much to evidence, rather than to a construction of the patents, that we may well remit it, as we have other questions of the kind, to the merits of the case.
The court, however, decided that the Canadian patent in terms described and claimed "the broad, generic invention of Berliner covered by the claims here in suit," and, to establish this, quoted Claims 5, 7, and 11 [Footnote 2] of the Canadian patent, and concluded that, if that patent expired in 1899, the patent in suit also expired. The court, however, decided, expressing, however, Page 213 U. S. 324 some hesitation, that the patent did not then expire, stating the rule to be, as established by the cases, that a United States patent is limited by the terms expressed in the foreign patent, and that it is not affected by any lapse or forfeiture of any portion of the term by means of any condition subsequent.
And it appears that the fee for the second term of six years was not paid, and that, because of such nonpayment, the patent expired February 11, 1899. The contention of petitioner is, as has been seen, that the patent in suit expired at the same date by virtue of § 4887, Revised Statutes. The necessary effect of that section, it is contended by petitioner, being that, if, by any act of omission of the patentee, the invention becomes free in a foreign country, it becomes free in this country. The contention of the respondent is that the domestic patent endures for the longest possible term of the foreign patent -- in other words, endures for the period expressed in the grant, and is not dependent upon or "subject to be terminated by the occurrence or nonconcurrence by certain facts which would require extraneous proof." These opposing contentions are discussed at great length by counsel, and a number of cases are cited. Page 213 U. S. 325