Court Opinion

ID: 9470790
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:16:00.851404+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:06.401881
License: Public Domain

SHADUR, District Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Because the majority opinion contains such a felicitous exposition of the principles that apply to our required determination of obviousness, it is easy to differentiate between the holdings (and the rationale) with which I concur and the one important holding from which I must dissent. There is no difference among us as to the invalidity of Fathauer ’989 or Fathauer ’751. Indeed our differences are materially lessened from those I had earlier thought to exist, for the majority now agrees that claim 2 of Schenkenberg ’091 is invalid as well. It therefore remains only to consider Schenk-enberg’s claim 1, which I would also find invalid on obviousness grounds — and for much the same reasons that have persuaded all of us on claim 2.1
Among the many unexceptionable aspects of the majority opinion is its succinct explanation at slip op. 5 of the district court’s premises (with which I gather all of us concur):
Neither party disputes the district court’s finding that both the planter monitor art and the electronics art are relevant to the obviousness inquiry. The court also found the level of ordinary skill in the planter art to be relatively unsophisticated, while the level of ordinary skill in the electronics art to be sophisticated.
When Schenkenberg and Fathauer did their work, “ordinary skill” (the standard of Section 103) was unquestionably much higher in the electronics field than the crude level that planter monitoring had reached.
This to me carries the necessary implication that the perspective from which Schenkenberg’s claimed invention must be viewed is that of a person knowledgeable in the art of electronics, who is then informed about the specific problem to be addressed in the planter monitoring area, and not that of a person knowledgeable about planters *350who must then be educated to the requisite level of skill in electronics.2 Nor is that merely a semantic difference, for the majority’s accurate statement (and therefore legally accurate resolution) of the problem as to claim 2 gives way to an inaccurate (only because it is incomplete) statement of the problem as to claim 1 (at 343):
The problem confronting Schenkenberg, and others like him at the time, was a broader one — a significantly broader one: how to devise a workable seed planter monitor.
If we hypothesize a person of ordinary skill in the electronics art3 — and that means all its ordinary phases and manifestations4 — to whom the planter monitoring problem were posed, the most obvious potential solution would have been a photoelectric cell circuit. Indeed even Dickey-john’s plainly non-expert “expert” Marsh, an electrical engineer, reacted in exactly that way when the problem was put to him (Dickey-john App. 157):
Q. How much time did you spend investigating the photoelectric principle?
A. It would be an outright guess, but in the beginning that’s the way I thought inherently, you know, we ought to try to go; and they, I guess, the people I was talking to at that time, indicated that any amount of dirt would, you know, just change the sensitivity so badly that you wouldn’t be able to detect it. So I’d say a week. I don’t know.
In other words, Marsh’s intuitive and sensible response to the problem was to think of the photoelectric cell as the solution. All that kept him from pursuing that solution was his ignorance of what all of us on this Court have found obvious: that the customary inclusion of a capacitor in the photoelectric-cell circuit would likely solve what he and the people he was talking to thought an insoluble problem — the dirty environment. And had he (or anyone with ordinary skill in the art) tried that solution instead of abandoning the concept at the outset, he would have found it was indeed the solution.
For that purpose the McGraw-Hill prior art is compelling on the issue of obviousness, not only as to claim 2 as the majority agrees (see at 342-343) but also as to claim 1. As the majority itself quotes (id. at 341), McGraw-Hill teaches what everyone with a modicum of skill in the electronics art knows about a wholly conventional type of photocell circuit (one containing a capacitor):
Without such capacitor coupling, the circuit responds not only to the dark spot on the paper but also to any gradual change in the light reflected from the rest of the paper. This high-speed relay will give more positive or definite action if its circuit responds only to sudden changes of light, so it is not affected by slow light changes caused by dirt gathering on the lens or phototube or by the use of a roll of darker paper.
*351It was the predecessor of the new Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that authored the charming conception of the prospective inventor surrounded by the prior art, In re Winslow, 365 F.2d 1017, 1020 (Cust. & Pat.App.1966):
We think the proper way to apply the 103 obviousness test to a case like this is to first picture the inventor as working in his shop with the prior art references— which he is presumed to know — hanging on the walls around him.
Had Marsh not been blinded by the secondhand preconceptions (and misconceptions) of persons who had knowledge in the planter art, but none in the electronics art — had the problem been addressed by anyone with really ordinary skill in the sophisticated art of electronics (and that means someone charged with constructive notice of the McGraw-Hill teaching) — the photocell solution would have been wholly obvious to him.
We should not permit ourselves to be diverted by what Marsh, through lack of real knowledge in the field in which he purported to be expert — electronics—permitted to snow him and to divert him from even trying the photoelectric cell. What dissuaded him from the obvious attempt to try what would have proved the real solution was his lack of understanding that the capacitor (an obvious component of the photoelectric-cell circuit) would do the job. Let us accept the majority on its own terms as stated at the end of its n. 6:
Arguably implicit in the determination that the prior photocell art is relevant is a determination that it would be obvious to employ a photocell in a planter; yet the photocell was the solution to the problem, not the problem itself, and the entire question is whether that solution would have been obvious.
Dickey-john’s own electronics man (and not just the expert witness for International Tapetronics, who is chided for second-guessing) acknowledged that the photocell was the obvious solution to be tried. And under the view the majority and I share, a photocell solution means a photocell-plus-capacitor circuit.
For that reason I believe the majority has led itself into error by the artificial division of a non-divisible problem. Its correct conclusion that Schenkenberg’s claim 2 is invalid cannot fairly be reconciled with its determination that claim 1 is valid. It therefore becomes inappropriate in my view to address the secondary considerations (which as the majority agrees have “limited probative value ... on the discrete question of obviousness”). Accordingly I dissent from Judge Eschbach’s thoughtful and able exposition only as to Schenkenberg’s claim 1, which should be invalidated along with claim 2.

. Because of this dissent as to claim 1, I take no position on the issue of willful and wanton infringement discussed at the end of the majority opinion.

. This is so because it obviously takes much more extensive teaching to raise someone to the level of ordinary skill in a highly sophisticated art.

. It may be that my own antediluvian (or at least pre-law and pre-World War II) degree in mathematics and physics, coupled with the war years spent in exploring the arcane mysteries of the then-primitive art of airborne radar, would have — had I pursued that path rather than the law — skewed my perception of “ordinary skill” in electronics. But at this stage, scarcely able to tune in a TV set, I surely do not possess anything remotely resembling current “ordinary skill.” Yet with my less than ordinary skill in the electronics art, I found immediately obvious both the capacitor solution (which the majority now agrees was obvious) and the photoelectric cell solution (which the majority does not find obvious). As the text discussion next reflects, both parties’ experts found the photoelectric cell the first and most obvious solution to explore.

. This proposition is stated specifically to confirm the absence of any disagreement with what seems to be a straw man in the majority’s n. 6:
One might question whether attributing to the hypothetical artisan on this claim an exhaustive knowledge of the electronics art is appropriate. Our hypothetical friend needs to be somewhat eclectic, but not the proverbial Renaissance man.