Court Opinion

ID: 8764281
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 12:19:08.247685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:01:46.122489
License: Public Domain

GROSSCUP, Circuit Judge
(concurring). I concur in the foregoing judgment; but am not prepared to hold that patented articles are never, under any circumstances, articles of trade or commerce among the several states, within the meaning of the Sherman Act; and do not think that that premise is essential to the conclusion arrived at.
The patentee, in this case, in good faith believed the patent valid, as did also all the parties entering into the contracts. Whatever, therefore, their effect may have actually been, the contracts were not intended to affect prices, except as the parties believed they had the right, because of the patent, to fix and maintain prices.
Now were the patentee the manufacturer, he would unquestionably have had the right to fix and maintain his own prices; and were the other parties to the contract manufacturers for the patentee, at a given •figure for such manufacture, the patentee’s right to fix and maintain the selling price would still remain; nor could this be questioned were he to make the manufacturers his selling agents also. How, then, does the contract under review make a case in which the patentee, through his manufacturer, is not entitled to fix and maintain prices— how is the arrangement, in effect, different in any way of restraining trade or competition, from the arrangement just supposed, in which the patentee unquestionably has that right?
True, in the case under review, the manufacturers, as to the public, are not competitors; but neither would they be in the cases supposed ; in both cases the public suffering nothing, except what the patentee had the right to exact; for so long, at least, as the patentee is not *365exacting, as the value of his invention, an unreasonable sum (and his action in that respect is not here questioned) it is within his own right to say whether the price exacted should be retained by himself, or shall be distributed among the people manufacturing for him. The contracts, therefore, in the case before us, having been made in good faith; and not as a mere subterfuge, I can see in them nothing that the Sherman Act was intended to prevent.