Court Opinion

ID: 9493396
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:06:46.824125+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:48.945243
License: Public Domain

LOURIE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. I agree with the district court and with Deere that no reasonable jury could have found that Deere’s tractors infringed the asserted claims under the doctrine of equivalents. Contrary to the majority’s assertion, the court did not perform a component-by-component analysis, it simply applied the well-established law of insubstantial differences to the particular structures at issue. There is no dispute that both the accused and disclosed structures perform the same function, which is to maintain the proper belt tension around the tractor wheels. However, unlike the disclosed structure, which maintains the proper belt tension by moving the entire front axle of the tractor forward or backward, the accused device maintains the proper belt tension in a substantially different way by moving the wheels individually. I also agree with the district court that the accused structure’s different way of maintaining belt tension also yields a substantially different result. Mechanical forces are distributed differently, there are fewer and smaller parts, and operator visibility is improved because there is no front axle obstructing the operator’s view of the ground below. Accordingly, because both the way in which the disclosed tensioning means functions and the result thereby obtained are substantially different from Deere’s swing link system, I agree with the district court that no reasonable jury could have found them to be equivalent under the doctrine of equivalents.