Court Opinion

ID: 9454999
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:06:11.021522+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:24.742289
License: Public Domain

*1108IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
While I find myself in full agreement with my brother Waterman’s general discussion of the applicable patent law, I disagree with his ultimate conclusion as to the obviousness, and hence the validity, of Shaw’s patent under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (1964). The Act, 35 U.S.C. § 101, authorizes patents on “ * * * any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter * * Shaw’s patent was for a “manufacture,” or in the common parlance, was a product patent, not a process patent. Product patents cover only the article — here the shaped synthetic bristle — and not the process, or method by which it is produced. Although a product claim “may, and indeed must, be read upon the specifications,” Musher Foundation v. Alba Trading Co., 150 F.2d 885 (2d Cir. 1945) (L. Hand, J.),
“ * * * the invention in the case of such a product patent must lie exclusively in the conception of the product, and regardless of any method of its production, though of course the patent must disclose one way by which it can be made. While that imposes a severe standard, it is no severer than it should be, if the monopoly is to extend to the product however made. Unless conception alone is the test, and if the inventor may eke out his right by recourse to the ingenuity involved in any process or the machine, he gains an unfair advantage; for the claims cover the product produced by other machines and processes, to which by hypothesis he has contributed nothing. * * * At times indeed a process may leave traces in the product and the difficulty is avoided, but that is seldom or never true of the product of a machine; * * Buono v. Yankee Maid Dress Corporation, 77 F.2d 274, 279 (2d Cir. 1935) (L. Hand, J.). See also General Electric Co. v. Wabash Co., 304 U.S. 364, 373-375, 58 S.Ct. 899, 82 L.Ed. 1402 (1938).
Applying the test announced in Buono, for Shaw to succeed, he must show that the idea of shaping linear filaments to improve stiffness must have been a new “conception,” one that would not have been obvious to one skilled in the art. Prior patents seem to me to indicate precisely the contrary. Most damning of all, in my view, is the Brubaker patent, which discusses drawing linear polymers through shaping dies and concludes:
“The present invention through the selection of different shape openings in the die makes possible the production of filaments of various forms, for example, filaments which approach being triangular, square, rectangular, oval, star, etc. * * * Bristles having a star shaped, cross-section have better stiffness than those having the same cross-sectional area in the form of a circle.” [Emphasis added.]
I find the Brubaker patent conclusive evidence that the product Shaw patented —a shaped bristle — was obvious even from a cursory examination of the prior art. The point is not that creating such a product was not difficult, or that it did not involve some ingenuity in devising a process; it is that devising the product itself was obvious. The law is clearly different where a process patent is involved; but that is not this case.
I would affirm on the ground of obviousness.