Court Opinion

ID: 9443131
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:11:48.938943+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:22.976458
License: Public Domain

O'CONNELL, Judge
(dissenting).
The appealed claims have been finally rejected here on a variety of views summarized on the question of patentability in the board’s decision and incorporated by quotation in the opinion of the majority as the views of this court. The disallowance of the claims ignores the fundamental facts expressly conceded by the board that appellant’s claimed structure not only is new and desirable but also unquestionably different from any one of the structures of the references relied upon as a ground of rejection. As appellant correctly asserts in his brief: “To say that such an accomplishment is lacking in invention is to disregard the plain facts. Tourist camps have been in course of development for thirty years, the Hatch apartment house patent is over sixty-five years old, and even the Earle and Coe patents have ¡been out for twenty and ten years respectively; and in spite of the ever present demand for better housing, no one conceived of the simple and inexpensive and highly satisfactory solution of the problem of multi-room-and-garage-unit construction until appellant hit upon that claimed in his application here involved.”
The claims were rejected by the examiner not only as unpatentable over the disclosure of the cited prior art but also1 “as directed to aggregations.” The Board of Appeals expressly overruled the examiner on his rejection of the claims on that ground but affirmed his action with respect to the rejection on the prior art. In so doing the board held further that it is “routine practice in designing building structures to adapt and modify basic architectural plans to provide for air ducts and other utility services.”
The latter statement, which appellant concedes to be axiomatic, is the real and inherent ground of the rejection. The cited art employed here discloses, however, that it has been customary in the Patent Office to grant patents for building structures when, in its opinion, the faculty of invention has resided in the disclosure and claims submitted by the applicant. This court has advanced the same legal principles and allowed the claims when the applicant has complied with the requirements of the law.1
The Solicitor for the Patent Office in urging the action which the majority have taken quoted authorities to the effect that when it comes to the allowance of patent claims, we cannot be unmindful of the fact that recent decisions of the Supreme Court now indicate a new and stricter interpretation of the statute on the question of patentability. To emphasize that proposition here, the solicitor has quoted more than twenty lines fromi the decision of Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket *715Equipment Corp., 340 U.S. 147, 71 S.Ct. 127, 95 L.Ed. 162. He has quoted also other lines from the decision of Sinclair & Carroll Co. v. Interchemical Corp., 325 U.S. 327, 330, 65 S.Ct. 1143, 1145, 89 L.Ed. 1644, to the effect that there should he no allowance of patent claims, unless those claims define some substantial innovation, “an innovation for which society is truly indebted to the efforts of the patentee.”
The proper test for the allowance of patent claims, such as we have here, as I construe the statute, was formulated by Mr. Justice Bradley for the Supreme Court in the case of Webster Loom Co. v. Higgins, 105 U.S. 580, 591, 26 L.Ed. 1177 to the effect that: “It may be laid down as a general rule, though perhaps not an invariable one, that if a new combination and arrangement of known elements produce a new and beneficial result, never attained before, it is evidence of invention. ^ Hi ”
The late Judge Hatfield applied the rule just quoted in the allowance of claims covering plans for the site and arrangement of an apartment house or structure. No valid reason has been disclosed either by the tribunals of the Patent Office or by the opinion of the majority for ignoring or discussing that decision; namely, In re Tourtellotte, supra.
The distinguished jurist, Learned Hand, writing for a unanimous court in the recent case of Philip A. Hunt Co. v. Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, 2 Cir., 177 F. 2d 583, 586-587, deemed constrained to accept and follow the ruling previously expressed by Judge Hatfield, speaking for a unanimous court, on the ground that his judicial views were persuasive as an experienced expert on matters relating to patentability and should be followed “save in a case of very clear difference of opinion”. The guidance of the authorities just cited persuade me to dissent from the views adopted by the majority and to urge the allowance of the appealed claims.
Furthermore, the language of the A. & P. case referred to by the Solicitor for the Patent Office may be readily misapplied and interpreted as laying down a hard and fast rule for resolving the question of invention in all cases involving combination patents.2 But, as correctly pointed out by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the recent case of Watson v. Heil, 192 F.2d 982, 985: “When it is shown that a mechanical problem has persisted for some time, and men of ordinary skill in the art have failed to meet it when it is to their interest to do so, there is at least some ground for the conclusion that it Was beyond their capacity. Such a circumstance has not infrequently been held sufficient to carry a discovery across the inventive line.”
There is no occasion in this case, as I see it, to adopt or extend a new and unwarranted construction of the patent law and thereby place our great host of inventors, scientists, and discoverers in a strait jacket nowise authorized by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, which made provision for those inventions and discoveries which tend “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” including inventions for improvements upon existing disclosures. The decision of the Board of Appeals should be reversed.

. In re Tourtellotte, 115 F.2d 344, 28 C.C.P.A.,Patents, 720; In re Rolph, 102 F.2d 875, 26 C.C.P.A.,Patents, 1064.

. McCord Corp. v. Beacon Auto Radiator Co., Inc., Cust. & Pat.App., 193 F.2d 985.