Court Opinion

ID: 9419425
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:26.641781+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:18.048219
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting:
The Court holds in effect that the owner of a patent who exacts, as the condition of a license, that unpatented materials used in connection with the invention shall be purchased only from the licensor cannot obtain relief from equity against one who supplies such unpatented materials even though the unpatented appliance was not for common use but was designedly adapted for the practice of the invention, but when so used did not involve an infringement of the patent. The decision is thus merely an appropriate application of what has come to be known as the doctrine in the Carbice case, 283 U. S. 27. In this view I concur.
But in the series of cases in which that doctrine has heretofore been applied (Motion Picture Co. v. Universal Film Co., 243 U. S. 502; Carbice Corp. v. American Patents Corp., supra; Morton Salt Co. v. Suppiger Co., 314 *677U. S. 488; B. B. Chemical Co. v. Ellis, 314 U. S. 495), not once has this Court found it relevant to reject, either explicitly or by indirection, another doctrine of the law, that of contributory infringement, nor has it seen fit to make animadversions upon it. This is so doubtless for the simple reason that appropriate occasions for relief against contributory infringement are unrelated to the circumstances which bring the Carbice doctrine into play. In a word, if there is no infringement of a patent there can be no contributory infringer.
Within its true limits the idea of contributory infringement was woven into the fabric of our law and has been part of it for now more than seventy years. See Roberts, Contributory Infringement of Patent Rights, 12 Harv. L. Rev. 35, and e. g. Thomson-Houston Electric Co. v. Ohio Brass Co., 80 P. 712. The doctrine has been put perhaps most simply by Judge Shepley: “Different parties may all infringe, by respectively making or selling, each of them, one of the elements of a patented combination, provided those separate elements are made for the purpose, and with the intent, of their being combined by a party having no right to combine them. But the mere manufacture of a separate element of a patented combination, unless such manufacture be proved to have been conducted for the purpose, and with the intent of aiding infringement, is not, in and of itself, infringement.” Saxe v. Hammond, Fed. Cas. No. 12,411, 1 Ban. & A. 629, 632. So understood, the doctrine of contributory infringement is an expression both of law and morals. It is but one phase of a more comprehending doctrine of legal liability enforced by this Court both in civil and criminal cases. See, for instance, American Bank & Trust Co. v. Federal Reserve Bank, 256 U. S. 350, and Direct Sales Co. v. United States, 319 U. S. 703. Indeed, the opinion in the Carbice case explicitly recognizes a proper scope for the doctrine of contributory infringement as a phase of the *678law.of torts: “Infringement, whether direct or contributory, is essentially a tort, and implies invasion of some right of the patentee.” Carbice Corp. v. American Patents Corp., 283 U. S. 27, 33.
To be sure, the doctrine of contributory infringement may be misconceived and has been misapplied. That is the fate of all shorthand statements of complicated ideas, whether in law or in the natural sciences. But the misapplication of a formula into which a complicated idea is compressed and thereby mutilated is a poor excuse for rejecting the idea. It will be time enough to define the appropriate limits of the doctrine of contributory infringement when we are required to deal with the problem. Until then litigants and lower courts ought not to be embarrassed by gratuitous innuendoes against a principle of the law which, within its proper bounds, is accredited by legal history as well as ethics. The long and on the whole not unworthy history of our judicial administration admonishes us against expressing views on matters not before us. The history of this Court especially admonishes us against the evils of giving opinions not called for. See e.. g. Hughes, The Supreme Court of the United States, p. 50, and 49 Harv. L. Rev. 68, 98. The duty of not going beyond the necessities of a case is not a lifeless technicality. The experience of centuries is behind the wisdom of not deciding, whether explicitly or by atmospheric pressure, matters that do not come to the Court with the impact of necessity.
For the reasons set forth by my brother Roberts, res judicata calls for affirmance.