Source: http://openjurist.org/525/us/55
Timestamp: 2015-10-08 16:34:51
Document Index: 517255114

Matched Legal Cases: ['§102', '§102', '§102', 'art.7', '§102', '§102', '§102', '§1008', '§1019', '§102']

525 US 55 Wayne Pfaff v. Wells Electronics Inc | OpenJurist
525 U.S. 55 - Wayne Pfaff v. Wells Electronics Inc Homethe United States Reports525 U.S.
525 US 55 Wayne Pfaff v. Wells Electronics Inc 525 U.S. 55119 S.Ct. 304142 L.Ed.2d 261
124 F.3d 1429
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATESWAYNE K. PFAFF, PETITIONERv.WELLS ELECTRONICS, INC.
No. 97 1130
Section 102(b) of the Patent Act of 1952 provides that no person is entitled to patent an "invention" that has been "on sale" more than one year before filing a patent application.1 We granted certiorari to determine whether the commercial marketing of a newly invented product may mark the beginning of the 1-year period even though the invention has not yet been reduced to practice.2
* On April 19, 1982, petitioner, Wayne Pfaff, filed an application for a patent on a computer chip socket. Therefore, April 19, 1981, constitutes the critical date for purposes of the on-sale bar of 35 U. S. C. §102(b); if the 1-year period began to run before that date, Pfaff lost his right to patent his invention.
The manufacturer took several months to develop the customized tooling necessary to produce the device, and Pfaff did not fill the order until July 1981. The evidence therefore indicates that Pfaff first reduced his invention to practice in the summer of 1981. The socket achieved substantial commercial success before Patent No. 4,491,377 (the '377 patent) issued to Pfaff on January 1, 1985.4
After a full evidentiary hearing before a Special Master,6 the District Court held that two of those claims (1 and 6) were invalid because they had been anticipated in the prior art. Nevertheless, the court concluded that four other claims (7, 10, 11, and 19) were valid and three (7, 10, and 11) were infringed by various models of respondent's sockets. App. to Pet. for Cert. 21a 22a. Adopting the Special Master's findings, the District Court rejected respondent's §102(b) defense because Pfaff had filed the application for the '377 patent less than a year after reducing the invention to practice.
The Court of Appeals reversed, finding all six claims invalid. 124 F.3d 1429 (CA Fed. 1997). Four of the claims (1, 6, 7, and 10) described the socket that Pfaff had sold to Texas Instruments prior to April 8, 1981. Because that device had been offered for sale on a commercial basis more than one year before the patent application was filed on April 19, 1982, the court concluded that those claims were invalid under §102(b). That conclusion rested on the court's view that as long as the invention was "substantially complete at the time of sale," the 1-year period began to run, even though the invention had not yet been reduced to practice. Id., at 1434. The other two claims (11 and 19) described a feature that had not been included in Pfaff 's initial design, but the Court of Appeals concluded as a matter of law that the additional feature was not itself patentable because it was an obvious addition to the prior art.7 Given the court's §102(b) holding, the prior art included Pfaff's first four claims.
Because other courts have held or assumed that an invention cannot be "on sale" within the meaning of §102(b) unless and until it has been reduced to practice, see, e. g., Timely Products Corp. v. Arron, 523 F.2d 288, 299 302 (CA2 1975); Dart Industries, Inc. v. E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., 489 F.2d 1359, 1365, n. 11 (CA7 1973), cert. denied, 417 U.S. 933 (1974), and because the text of §102(b) makes no reference to "substantial completion" of an invention, we granted certiorari. 523 U.S. ___ (1998).
The primary meaning of the word "invention" in the Patent Act unquestionably refers to the inventor's conception rather than to a physical embodiment of that idea. The statute does not contain any express requirement that an invention must be reduced to practice before it can be patented. Neither the statutory definition of the term in §1008 nor the basic conditions for obtaining a patent set forth in §1019 make any mention of "reduction to practice." The statute's only specific reference to that term is found in §102(g), which sets forth the standard for resolving priority contests between two competing claimants to a patent. That subsection provides:
"It is quite true that when Bell applied for his patent he had never actually transmitted telegraphically spoken words so that they could be distinctly heard and understood at the receiving end of his line, but in his specification he did describe accurately and with admirable clearness his process, that is to say, the exact e