Opinion ID: 507888
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: 2 The inventor, James N. McGee, an employee of the assignee Burlington, conceived and reduced to practice an improved V-belt cover fabric. He ran a bias-cut fabric through a thin solution of rubber polymer and conductive carbon black. He said he impregnated the individual fibers in the yarn bundle. Disclosure of April 23, 1979. The patent attorney who prosecuted the patent application says  he understood the invention covered by the patent was to impregnate the fiber bundles and encapsulate the individual fibers, and it never occurred to him the patent he applied for would or could be read as claiming an ability to impregnate the individual fibers. To a lay reader it might appear, as it certainly did to the trial judge, that the two phrases mean something different, but the attorney says he and others unconsciously inserted the word bundles after the word fiber. The patent itself, summary, specifications, and claims, use both phrases with a fine impartiality. Moreover, no one asserts there was more than one invention: thus the correct full description of it must be one or the other and cannot be both, taken literally. The importance of the issue derives from the trial court's belief that by claiming impregnation of individual fibers, the patent attorney avoided a prior art rejection which he at first confronted and which caused a Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejection of the first application. In the detailed description we read: 3 The continuous fabric strip 12 formed during slitting is then treated with a fluid mix of elastomeric polymeric material to impregnate in the yarn bundles thereof and to encapsulate the individual fibers of such bundles with the polymeric material. [Col. 2, line 61.] 4 The numeral 12 refers to Fig. 1 of the patent which shows means to coat the belt by running it through a shallow dish containing the fluid mix 13. Here the inventor carefully avoids saying he impregnates the fibers. Yet he goes on: 5 The fluid mix 13 according to the present invention preferably has a low viscosity so that impregnation of the fibers is insured. [Col. 3, line 13.] Later he reverts to the first formulation: 6 The purpose being to provide a solvent mix of suitable viscosity permitting effective yarn bundle impregnation to coat the individual fibers. [Col. 3, line 43.] 7 (   the present invention deliberately avoids dyeing in favor of coloring only the fiber surface by pigmenting.) Since each of the fibers of the present cover fabric is encapsulated with the impregnating polymeric material   . [Col. 5, line 19.] 8 Thus, the writer continuously shifts his phraseology while apparently under the impression he is saying the same thing. A like phenomenon occurs in the patent claims: 9 Claim 1 adopts once more the phraseology of the more careful formulation: 10    [t]he individual fibers of said yarns being encapsulated in a dried pigmented elastomeric polymer,   . 11 Claim 2 is dependent on Claim 1. Yet claim 3 declares: 12 [t]he fabric cover being produced from a continuous fabric strip by impregnating the individual fibers. 13 Claims 4 and 5 again impregnate the individual fibers. There follow some dependent claims, and Claims 12 and 13 again impregnate the fabric, while 16 impregnates the individual fibers once more. 14 In the original application, with 20 claims, a similar confusion is found--we say confusion if one assumes the inventor had made but one invention and that he knew, as he says, of no way a mix such as he described would impregnate the individual fibers if they were man made; also, if the mix did impregnate the individual fibers, the asserted advantage of white showing through, revealing the extent of wear, when the outer encapsulation wore off, would be lost. [Col. 1, line 62 to Col. 2, line 14.] The confusion could not possibly have been the product of any rejection by the examiner as it obtained in the file papers from the beginning. 15 Mr. Robert A. Vanderhye, the patent attorney who prosecuted the application, asserted in an affidavit that he used the shorter formulation, as illustrated in Claim 3 as shorthand for a complicated concept. He unconsciously inserted the word bundles after the word fiber. We do not have any explanation by the examiner of his mental attitude, but it is difficult to believe he did not share in the patent attorney's mistake. He must be charged with notice of the actual contents of the patent, as issued with his approval, and it is difficult to believe he would not have noticed the confusion, and demanded a clarification, if he had ever consciously adverted to there being a difference in meaning between impregnating an individual fiber and impregnating a bundle. The trial court, after the controversy had arisen, and with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, read the patent entirely differently than did those concerned with its issue, and we wonder how anybody skilled in patent law and practice could have generated such confusion without a sinister purpose. That is the fascinating puzzle this case presents.