Court Opinion

ID: 9455373
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:20:28.121799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:34.604921
License: Public Domain

IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the result):
I would affirm the judgment of the district court on the ground that the patent is void for obviousness. From the foreign patents and the testimony at trial, it is clear that reduced scale charts and patterns were a part of the prior art. Given these basic building blocks, the process of making reduced scale markers from reduced scale models would have been obvious to a skilled marker maker; and the Littman patent discloses no more.
In reaching a conclusion of anticipation, I believe the majority are treading, unnecessarily I might add, on extremely thin ice. Observing that “the temptation to remember in such cases and the ease with which honest witnesses can convince themselves after many years of having had a conception at the basis of a valuable patent,” the Supreme Court has instructed “that evidence to prove prior discovery must be clear and satisfactory.” Eibel Process Co. v. Minnesota & Ontario Paper Co., 261 U.S. 45, 60, 43 S.Ct. 322, 327, 67 L.Ed. 523 (1923). In the instant case, the evidence looks wan and feeble in the face of that stringent standard. The testimony on prior use, with a single exception uncorroborated, consisted solely of recollection of ancient vintage. The employers of most of the witnesses who offered this testimony could have been held liable as infringers had the Littman patent been held valid. The “documentation” dredged up in support of the testimony was ludicrous.
The Dasey patent offers no more secure support for a conclusion of anticipation than does the evidence on prior use. This patent discloses a method for planning a factory or office layout by means of reduced scale models. Laying out an office does not require nearly the same degree of exactitude as the cutting of a garment. I would not be especially upset to discover my desk five inches closer to the wall than I had expected. I would be considerably more perturbed to find my right sleeve five inches longer than the left.