Task: songer_direct1

What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Your task is to determine the ideological directionality of the court of appeals decision, coded as "liberal" or "conservative". Consider liberal to be for government tax claim; for person claiming patent or copyright infringement; for the plaintiff alleging the injury; for economic underdog if one party is clearly an underdog in comparison to the other, neither party is clearly an economic underdog; in cases pitting an individual against a business, the individual is presumed to be the economic underdog unless there is a clear indication in the opinion to the contrary; for debtor or bankrupt; for government or private party raising claim of violation of antitrust laws, or party opposing merger; for the economic underdog in private conflict over securities; for individual claiming a benefit from government; for government in disputes over government contracts and government seizure of property; for government regulation in government regulation of business; for greater protection of the environment or greater consumer protection (even if anti-government); for the injured party in admiralty - personal injury; for economic underdog in admiralty and miscellaneous economic cases. Consider the directionality to be "mixed" if the directionality of the decision was intermediate to the extremes defined above or if the decision was mixed (e.g., the conviction of defendant in a criminal trial was affirmed on one count but reversed on a second count or if the conviction was afirmed but the sentence was reduced). Consider "not ascertained" if the directionality could not be determined or if the outcome could not be classified according to any conventional outcome standards.

PAGE, Circuit Judge.
In this action, •upon patent No. 735,414, now expired, invalidity was found. Claim 9, chiefly argued and relied on, is as follows:
“A double-deck baseule bridge comprising” (1) “a lifting span provided with two floors located one above the other,” (2) “and an approach having two corresponding floors or roadways,” (3) “the ends of the span floors which meet the approach floors or roadways being extended past the support by which the span is sustained,” (4) “and the end of the lower span floor which meets the lower approach or roadway being extended past the adjacent end of the upper span floor to a point outside of the path of the said end of the upper span floor.”
Baseule bridges and lifting spans are very old, and in Chicago long antedated the patent in question. Whether a truss-span shall carry one, two, or a dozen floors presents merely questions of loads, thrusts, strains, and stresses, to be determined by mathematical calculations, and does not get into the field of discovery or experimentation. The second element means nothing, except there are to be as many approaches as there are road levels on the bridge. The third and fourth elements present the problem of keeping the ends of the approaches out of the way of the shore end of the span, which must move in the are of a circle when raised and, lowered, clearly a matter within the knowledge of any engineer. Much stress is placed upon the admission of Gen. Goethals that designing such a bridge presented a problem, and that plaintiff’s patent solved that problem. That did not mean that the solution of problems necessarily means invention.
We are of opinion that no invention is shown.
Decree is affirmed.

Question: What is the ideological directionality of the court of appeals decision?
A. conservative
B. liberal
C. mixed
D. not ascertained
Answer:

Answer: A