What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
Max WASSERMAN, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. BURGESS & BLACHER CO., Defendant, Appellee.
No. 4844.
United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.
Dec. 6, 1954.
Ezekiel Wolf, Boston, Mass., for appellant.
Arthur D. Thomson, Boston, Mass., with whom Mary C. Metcalf, Milton, Mass., was on brief, for appellee.
Before MAGRUDER, Chief Judge, and WOODBURY and HARTIGAN, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM.
This is an appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, entered March 23, 1954, dismissing an action brought by Max Wasserman against Burgess & Blacher Co., a Massachusetts corporation, under Title 28 U.S.C. § 1338.
The complaint charges the defendant with infringement of plaintiff’s U.S Patent No. 2,610,593, granted September 16, 1952.
The opinion of the district court holding said patent to be invalid for want of invention is reported in 1954, 119 F.Supp. 684, 686.
The Wasserman patent relates to a type of skylight construction employing a plastic material in place of glass. This construction, which can be pre-fabricat-ed as a unit, is a basic square or rectangular metal frame with a top and two sides which fits over the wooden curbing of the roof opening. The inner side of the frame extends slightly above the level of the top side of the frame so as to provide a condensation gutter. The top or covering member of the frame joins both sides and then continues outwardly on a horizontal plane to form a marginal flange. On top of this basic frame there is set an elliptic plastic dome with an outwardly projecting base flange coextensive with the horizontal flange of the frame. The dome and frame are joined on these flanges by passing bolts through aligned holes in these flanges; the holes in the plastic being slightly larger in diameter than the bolts so as to allow for the expansion and contraction of the plastic.
The district court in holding that the patent is invalid for want of invention stated that “ * * * practically every element in the plaintiff’s patent was taken directly from the prior art and those that were not (if there are any) were either suggested by the prior art or else were devised by the patentee as unstartling routine solutions to problems incident to the use of the materials incorporated in the plaintiff’s patent.” An element which did not appear in previous skylight construction as disclosed in the references cited by the defendant was “ * * * the expedient of locating the fastening means on flanges exterior to and outside of the curb of the skylight opening * * * ” so as to prevent water from seeping into the interior of the building. The district court stated that “This expedient, satisfactory and useful as it is, still appears to be the type of solution which one might expect from the ordinary skilled mechanic and does not rise to the dignity of invention.” “The question whether an improvement requires mere mechanical skill or the exercise of the faculty of invention, is one of fact * * * Thomson Spot Welder Co. v. Ford Motor Co., 1924, 265 U.S. 445, 446, 44 S.Ct. 533, 534, 68 L.Ed. 1098. “Findings of fact shall not be set aside unless clearly erroneous * * * .” Rule 52, Fed.Rules Civ.Proc. 28 U.S.C. O’Brien v. O’Brien, 7 Cir., 1953, 202 F.2d 254; Red Devil Tools v. Hyde Mfg. Co., 1 Cir., 1951, 193 F.2d 491; B. F. Sturtevant Co. v. Massachusetts Hair & Felt Co., 1 Cir., 1941, 122 F.2d 900.
It was never the object of the patent laws to grant a monopoly “ * * * for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.” Atlantic Works v. Brady, 1882, 107 U.S. 192, 200, 2 S.Ct. 225, 231, 27 L.Ed. 438. See Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp., 1950, 340 U.S. 147, 71 S.Ct. 127, 95 L.Ed. 162. Congress by the passage of the Patent Act of 1952 which enacted as a statutory condition of patentability that the proposed invention would not “ * * * have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains”, merely codified the existing decisional law. 35 U.S.C. § 103. General Motors Corp. v. Estate Stove Co., 6 Cir., 1953, 203 F.2d 912, certiorari denied 346 U.S. 822, 74 S.Ct. 37; see Stanley Works v. Rockwell Mfg. Co., 3 Cir., 1953, 203 F.2d 846, certiorari denied 346 U.S. 818, 74 S.Ct. 30.
The judgment of the district court is affirmed.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 1