Court Opinion

ID: 9451726
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:22:33.920648+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:51.702719
License: Public Domain

FAHY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
There is a factual difference between this case and Monaco v. Watson, 106 U.S. App.D.C. 142, 270 F.2d 335, as pointed out by the court, in that here a patent had issued previously whereas only competing applications were involved in Monaco. Nevertheless, the construction given by the Commissioner to 35 U.S.C. § 135, under which a patent could be issued by him in this case, is a. reasonable one which I think we should accept.
Were authority to issue the patent to Kamp et al. not found in Section 135 it would not follow that appellants would be entitled to a preliminary injunction to restrain the Commissioner from issuing the patent to Kamp et al., who the Patent Office has decided in the interference proceedings are entitled to priority of invention, thus deciding also that appellants are not entitled to the patent they hold. In this situation it was not incumbent upon the District Court to stay the hand of the Commissioner and enjoin him by preliminary injunction from taking the step he had decided the law permits, even though the law might not require it. There might be cases where the public or private interest, or both, would be properly served by withholding issuance of a patent to one found entitled thereto if a patent for the same invention were extant. This does not appear to me to be such a case at this stage of its history. No irreparable injury to appellants is shown to warrant a preliminary injunction now. The efficacy of the court proceedings to settle the controversy would not be impaired by our affirmance of the court’s denial of the injunction.
The exclusive right to their discoveries granted by the Constitution to inventors, referred to in the majority opinion, presupposes that the claim of discovery is valid, the question still to be decided by the court in this controversy.