Court Opinion

ID: 9453626
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:19:16.578192+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:44.250201
License: Public Domain

HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge
(concurring) :
While I concur in my brother Bryan’s opinion, I feel that mention of the doctrine of equivalents is necessary, lest my position be misunderstood.
It readily appears from the majority opinion’s discussion of the prior art that the Karnofsky patent was not a generic patent or anything approaching a generic patent. By substituting horizontal rotation of redesigned cells for vertical rotation of baskets, Karnofsky achieved efficiencies resulting in the recovery of a larger amount of oil with a lower cost of operation. While this represented a substantial, patentable improvement, it was not a revolutionary achievement. Had Karnofsky’s discovery constituted a revolutionary development, I would have little difficulty in extending to it a range of equivalents sufficiently broad to encompass the Upton extractor, notwithstanding the fact that Upton embodied certain improvements. The presence of improvements does not necessarily avoid the question of an infringing appropriation, and seems to me relevant here only as showing that a reversal of the rotational elements was not an obvious equivalent of Karnofsky. Since the Kamof-sky patent is merely an improvement patent and is restricted to a much narrower range of equivalents, Edwards v. Johnston Formation Testing Corp., CCA 5th, 56 F.2d 49, I agree that the Upton device does not constitute an equivalent which infringes the Karnofsky Rotocel. I reach this conclusion not just because Upton represents an improvement over Kar-nofsky, but rather because Upton’s inventive advance was necessary to achieve the same relative motion by a reversal of the rotational elements. This takes Upton outside the narrow range of equivalents which may properly be assigned to Karnofsky.