Opinion ID: 1188921
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Mr. Hyatt's Evidence

Text: In this case, the district court found that Mr. Hyatt's failure to proffer his declaration to the PTO was merely negligent. Hyatt v. Dudas, No. 03-0901, 2005 WL 5569663, at  (D.D.C. Sept.30, 2005) ( Hyatt II ) (Hyatt's failure to explain why he didn't submit his declaration earlier is negligent, and the district court need not consider evidence negligently submitted after the end of administrative proceedings.). There has been no finding of bad faith, fraud, willful withholding, intentional suppression or even gross negligence in this case. The PTO did not argue to either the district court or this court that the facts in this case would establish intentional suppression or willful withholding by Mr. Hyatt. Rather, the PTO argued that the facts established that Mr. Hyatt acted negligently or in the alternative grossly negligently. Appellee's Br. 51-53. In fact, the PTO argues that Mr. Hyatt's focus on intentional or deliberate conduct misses the point. Appellee's Br. 51. Analogizing the present case to Schering Corp. v. Marzall, 101 F.Supp. 571 (D.D.C.1951), the PTO distinguishes between suppression on the one hand and evidence withheld without sufficient excuse on the other. Id. at 34-35. If the majority would like the willful withholding standard to be applied and for fact findings to be made accordingly, it must vacate and remand for the district court to do so in the first instance. Because willful withholding was not argued by the parties or considered by the district court, we as an appellate court simply cannot know the volume of evidence that may exist on the issue nor are we in a position to judge Mr. Hyatt's credibility. I find troubling the majority's characterizations of Mr. Hyatt. See, e.g., Maj. Op. at 1275 (Mr. Hyatt purposefully kept [the Board] in the dark); id. (his blatant noncooperation); id. at 1275 (Mr. Hyatt willfully refused to provide evidence in his possession); id. (Hyatt refused to cooperate); id. (Hyatt's willful non-cooperation); id. at 1277 (Hyatt willfully refused); id. at 1274 (providing his declaration should have been simple for him); id. at 1277 (that Hyatt's failure to perform a simple task that it was his burden to perform is inexcusable); id. at 1277 (Hyatt's perverse unhelpfulness). None of this appears in the district court proceedings, the PTO proceedings, or the recordthese fact findings ought to be left to the district court which is in the best position to weigh the contradictory evidence. Contrary to the appellate finding of willful withholding, the record contains ample evidence of a lack of willful withholding. Here, the examiner rejected all of Mr. Hyatt's 117 claims for lack of written description, failure to enable, obviousness-type double patenting (over 8 separate references), and Schneller -type double patenting (over the same 8 references). The examiner also rejected 9 claims as anticipated ( Hill reference) and 7 as obvious (over a combination of three references). Technically, Mr. Hyatt was appealing 45 separate issues totaling 2546 separate rejections of his 117 claims to the Board. He wrote a 129-page appeal brief addressing all of these different rejections. [7] And, to be clear, the Board reversed all the examiner's rejections for obviousness, anticipation, obviousness-type double patenting, Schneller -type double patenting, and many of the written description and enablement rejections. With regard to the written description rejections in particular, the Board reversed the rejections of 38 claims and sustained the rejections of 79 claims. Mr. Hyatt prevailed on 92% of all the examiner's rejections at the Board level. Despite Mr. Hyatt's success, the majority declares Mr. Hyatt's response to be completely and wholly inadequate and Mr. Hyatt to have been perversely unhelpful. Maj. Op. at 1277, 1278. With respect to the written description issue, Mr. Hyatt responded to the rejectionsas the majority explainswith thirty six pages of argument and Table-1. While the Board criticizes Table-1, the Board reversed thirty-eight of the examiner's rejections for lack of written description and in some cases relied upon exactly the information referenced in Table-1. For example, the Board found support for a data decompressed video image input circuit generating data decompressed image information (in thirty-three claims) on page 23 of the 236-page specification, the exact and only location where table-1 says the terms data compressed and decompressed appeared. See, e.g., Ex Parte Hyatt, No. 2000-2049 (B.P.A.I. July 30, 2002) at 19-20. Although Mr. Hyatt may have failed to overcome all of the written description rejections based upon his submissions to the PTO, he did not fail to fulfill an obligation or affirmative duty, and he certainly was not perversely unhelpful as the majority alleges. With all of these facts, and no one arguing willful withholding, should we be finding it in the first instance? I believe the court is wrong to hold that breach of the newly created affirmative duty, i.e., not producing evidence to the PTO, is willful withholding as a matter of law. It is helpful to compare these facts to one of the only examples of willful withholding, where a court excluded evidence of reduction to practice where the assignee corporation expressly refused to disclose and to allow their witnesses to answer questions before the PTO in order to maintain a commercial advantage. Barrett, 22 F.2d at 396 ([T]he Barrett Company forbade them to answer.). Barrett represents an extreme and unwarranted position, and the majority chooses to go far beyond even that standard. Mr. Hyatt's conduct here hardly rises to the level of the Barrett Company. There is no evidence that Mr. Hyatt intentionally withheld information to retain some commercial advantage, as in Barrett. Rather, the majority concludes that where an applicant fails to convince the PTO of his position, he is foreclosed from bringing in new evidence to further that position in a § 145 action, regardless of whether he believed he had submitted adequate evidence to the PTOi.e., regardless of the applicant's intent. In hindsight, perhaps Mr. Hyatt should have submitted his declaration or that of any other expert earlier in the prosecution process. But hindsight is misleadingly acute. Declarations and expert reports are time consuming and expensive to prepare. It is hardly reasonable or even desirable to require patent applicants to put massive declarations into the record at an early stage of prosecution, weighing the cost to both the applicant and the PTO. See generally Mark A. Lemley, Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office, 95 Nw. U.L.Rev. 1495 (2003) (arguing that it would be inefficient for the PTO to overinvest in examination because so few patents are enforced). In this case, for example, the examiner rejected the claims on many different bases (double patenting on 8 different references, obviousness, anticipation, enablement, written description, etc.), totaling 2546 separate rejections. The Board overturned nearly all of them. It is easy with the benefit of hindsight to say Mr. Hyatt should have introduced more evidence on written description to the Board. But Mr. Hyatt was not facing merely a written description rejection, he was facing 2546 separate rejections on many, many different bases. The majority implausibly asserts that 2546 separate rejections is proportional to Hyatt's prosecution of an application containing 117 pending claims spanning 79 pages. Maj. Op. at 1278 n. 35. An average of 21 rejections per claim is hardly proportional. Mr. Hyatt was forced to appeal 45 independent issues to the Board when the average is two. Dennis D. Crouch, Understanding the Role of the Board of Patent Appeals in Ex Parte Appeals, 4, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=XXXXXXXXX. Despite this challenge, Mr. Hyatt was largely successful on appeal. Further, the length of Mr. Hyatt's application suggests that his efforts to pinpoint pages containing certain terms was helpful and in good faith. Mr. Hyatt's response may have been especially valuable in the time before searchable electronic applications. To say that Mr. Hyatt had an affirmative duty to introduce all evidence to the Board or that he owed (Maj. Op. at 1278) all the evidence he possessed is to put an enormous and undesirable burden on the patentee, one that will foreclose patent protection for many small inventors. Congress foresaw exactly this problem and ameliorated it with § 145 by providing applicants a way to initiate a civil action and introduce new evidence after Board proceedings when the issues are much more succinct and consolidated. This is illustrated perfectly here, where the applicant was contending with 2546 rejections on many different bases before the Board. After the Board overturned nearly all of them, only a small number of rejections based on written description/enablement were maintained. Hence at the district court the applicant could proffer much more extensive evidence because the universe of issues was greatly narrowed. This is the sensible approach Congress enacted. The statute even places the cost of the proceeding on the party better positioned to know the value of the applicationthe applicant. The majority's new exclusionary rule based upon its new affirmative duty upsets this balance.