Court Opinion

ID: 9489701
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:21:59.65003+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:40.173934
License: Public Domain

BRYSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the result.
I agree with the court that summary judgment should not have been granted in this case, but I disagree with the court’s analysis in one respect. I therefore concur in the result with regard to the summary judgment issue.
In granting the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, the district court relied on two purported offers to sell a product made by the patented process: the “Logan offer” and the “Garden City offer.” As to the Garden City transaction, the evidence does not establish that there was an actual offer to construct a track made by the patented process. The purported Logan offer, however, presents a closer question. The undisputed evidence supports the district court’s conclusion that a Ritchie employee, Joseph Rothwell, sent a proposal to the Logan High School track coach, offering to construct a track “just like Beloit,” by which Rothwell meant a track constructed by the same Seal-Flex process that was used at Beloit High School. Nonetheless, the evidence with respect to the purported Logan offer does not clearly establish that Rothwell was authorized to make an offer to sell the claimed process at the time the Logan proposal was made. For that reason, I agree with the court that summary judgment should not have been granted in this ease.
Although this court has articulated the legal standard for the “on-sale bar” of 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) in different ways, it seems to me that the language and policies of the statute are best captured by the following rule: if the sale or offer in question embodies the invention for which a patent is later sought, a sale or offer to sell that is primarily for commercial purposes and that occurs more than one year before the application renders the invention unpatentable. Accordingly, if the evidence at trial shows that Rothwell’s communications with representatives of Logan High School constituted an authorized offer to make a purely commercial sale of a product embodying the patented method, those communications (which occurred more than a year before the patent applications were filed) would trigger the on-sale bar and invalidate the patents in suit.
An inventor should not be able to sell his invention for commercial purposes, but avoid the on-sale bar by separately conducting tests on his invention. As I view the case, it is therefore irrelevant to the status of the Logan transaction that Maxfield was continuing to evaluate the performance of the Seal-Flex process at the Beloit track. If the Logan transaction constituted an offer to make a commercial sale of a product made by the later-patented process, the on-sale bar should be triggered even if Maxfield was concurrently conducting tests on his process at another facility.