Opinion ID: 208706
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Wood Paper Patent case

Text: The list of Supreme Court cases relied on by my colleagues continues with The Wood-Paper Patent, 90 U.S. 566, 596, 23 Wall. 566, 23 L.Ed. 31 (1874), where claims with the standard substantially as described language were construed in two reissue patents relating to the pulping of wood to make paper. The Court explained that one reissue patent was for a product or manufacture, and not for the process by which the product may be obtained, and the other for a process and not for its product. Id. at 593. The Court examined the prior art and concluded that the claim for the product could not be sustained, because the product produced by the inventor's new pulping process was not new: Paper-pulp obtained from various vegetable substances was in common use before the original patent was granted to Watt & Burgess, and whatever may be said of their process for obtaining it, the product was in no sense new. The reissued patent, No. 1448, is, therefore, void for want of novelty in the manufacture patented. Id. at 596. The Court then discussed the reissue patent for the process and not for its product, and held this reissue void because it claimed a different invention than in the original patent. The Court also discussed several other patents directed to boilers used to produce paper-pulp, and to a process for bleaching straw. Nothing in this case concerns the product-by-process issue on which the court is today acting. I cannot discern why the en banc court relies on The Wood-Paper Patent case as invalidating Scripps, and the court has not attempted to explain.