Court Opinion

ID: 9443373
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:18:53.532805+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:28.197761
License: Public Domain

JOHNSEN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The patent here is on a solution of “3-nitro” and water, in fixed proportions, for use as a specific' in treating certain poultry disease or as a tonic in stimulating general poultry growth. The water merely serves as a vehicle for inducing natural oral ingestion of the “3-nitro” and for controlling the amount of its dosage.
The situation is a comparatively simple one, but evaluating it in the light of the background, history, processes and results, which the record shows to be. involved in the discovery, I agree with the District Court that the discoverer was entitled to a patent, with its accompanying monopoly of the right to use “3-nitro” and water as a poultry-remedy combination.
It further seems obvious to me that, if the poultry industry is to be able to get the *477benefit of the discovery, the only way in which this can be made to occur is through the method of sale which the patentee has used. Poultry raisers throughout the country are not, of course, going to buy drinking water for their chickens from the State of Iowa, nor could they afford to do so. The natural consequence of being required to obtain the benefit of the patent in that manner would be simply to leave the chicken world without the remedy.
It is, however, not this consideration which makes me unable to discern in the present situation the existence of the evil which the Carbice case, the Morton Salt case, the Leitch case, the Mercoid case, and the other cases cited in the majority opinion seek to prevent. As a question of market reality, under the test of what the pat-entee is attempting to do or what may be its commercial effect, I am unable to see here any engaging by the patentee in some tangential exploitation or any producing by it of some collateral monopoly. To me, all that the patentee is doing is vending its poultry medicine.
The patentee is not trying to sell the poultry raiser “3-nitro” but chicken medicine. And the poultry raiser who purchases the patentee’s tablets or powder is not on the market for “3-nitro” but for chicken medicine. His is not a demand for a general market commodity but for a product of medicinal form, quantity and direction. Bags or barrels of “3-nitro”, standing on a feed-store floor as a market commodity, would not be touched so far as he is concerned. Nor is it the opportunity to sell him “3-nitro” as such a market commodity for which appellants are clamoring. Their business, like that of the patentee, is “the poultry medicine business.” What they are after here is the chance to sell medicinal form, quantity and direction, or in other words poultry remedy.
In these commercial realities, it seems to me a strained concept to say that what the patentee is attempting to do is to achieve a .monopolistic control of the sale of “3-nitro” as a general market commodity in the chicken-raiser’s world, and that in order to do so it is making its patent available to any chicken-raiser by way of implied license for using such “3-nitro” as may be purchased from it, in water solution, as a poultry remedy. In common sense viewpoint and in market significance, the pat-entee is simply selling to a chicken-raiser, as a purchaser and not as a licensee, its patent preparation, in dry form, with directions for adding the necessary quantity of water. I should regard the sale of any patented preparation, of which ordinary water is an ingredient, as constituting in sufficient substance a practicing of the patent, where it is sold without the water and directions are given the purchaser for the adding of it. And I can see no difference in this respect whether the other ingredients involved are many in number or few.