Court Opinion

ID: 9471016
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:23:23.301036+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:14.203043
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Circuit Judge,
with whom COWEN, Senior Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting.
Respectfully, I dissent.
In the majority opinion the whole case is made to turn on what appears to me to be the weakest ground of the several on which the decision below stands, public use of the invention more than one year before the date of the patent application. This “public use” boils down to tests performed in St. Louis August 1976. Some 76 female heads of households were given, without charge, granular and powdered versions of the invention to try in their homes. They were instructed how to use the samples. They were not required to sign any agreement of confidentiality and could use as much as they wanted without legal restriction, being asked to return any unused portion. After about two weeks they were interviewed. Questions largely focused on whether or not they would buy, but inquiry also included ease or difficulty of taking up the product in the home vacuum cleaner, with varying types of carpets, efficiency of the product in deodorizing, particularly in the 37 percent of homes that included pets, and with respect to smoke odors, objectionable odor *1138from the product itself (found to be a major problem), quantity of product used in relation to carpet area cleaned, mechanical problems with the vacuum cleaners (none reported), and problems dispensing the product from its container. Why females exclusively were selected for the test is not stated, but may be surmised.
The majority assumes that all this could have been duplicated in the laboratory, except the consumer reaction testing not considered an acceptable part of the experimentation required to complete “reduction to practice.” The idea that the other tests could have been duplicated in the laboratory seems highly improbable and one would like to know the record support for it. It seems to be supposed that the laboratory technician could anticipate all the varieties of carpets used in St. Louis homes, and all their degrees of age and wear; all the varieties of vacuum cleaners, with their variegated workings and degree of wear and tear; and all the ways the householder could produce malfunctions by dealing with the product in an unforeseen manner, with all the brands of engineering ineptitude to be anticipated in the average home. He would also have to know how strong the odor of the product would have to be to be offensive to the “female head of household” (or the family cat), and how activity and uncleanliness of pets might generate problems for the product to solve. It would seem this supposititious laboratory technician would have to be quite a paragon, and the inventor might be much impressed with his talents and still wish to learn by actual experience in the home, some of the ways that Murphy’s law might operate to wreck his hopes.
What the court is really saying is that the inventor of a product for use by amateur engineers in the home cannot test the product by amateur engineers in the home without the occurrence of a “public use” starting the year of § 102(b) to run. It appears to me such a rule is well calculated to thwart and nullify, in the consumer product category, the experimental use exception itself. Yet this exception is well established. E.g., In Re Yarn Processing Patent Validity Litigation, 498 F.2d 271, 285, 183 USPQ 65 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 1057, 95 S.Ct. 640, 42 L.Ed.2d 654 (1974). The board did conclude that the test was “motivated primarily by the desire for competitive exploitation.” All this seems to mean is that the developers desired to compete with others and make money, and this they doubtless would be the last to deny. In order to make money they needed to know, without costly failure and recall after marketing, whether the product would work under home conditions. The test was in no way a start towards commercial exploitation itself even as a pilot or test marketing project. The further contrary deduction that all the tests could be performed in the laboratory seems to be the court’s, not the board’s. Assuming as the court does that our function is only partly appellate, because we are not sitting in review of any credentialed fact finder entitled to the “clearly erroneous” standard of review, and that we make our own fact findings from the raw record, it seems to me we should make fact findings that are more plausible than these.
The court lays stress on the absence of effort during the test to keep the composition of the product secret. The results of the test inured to the inventors alone, so a would be copyist who secured one of the samples would not know how successful the test was, though he could know by “reverse engineering” how the sample was made up. In view of the court’s freedom in fact findings, I find that such a ritual of accounting for the samples and confidentiality agreements would have annoyed the housewives and made their reactions calculated and unspontaneous, and possibly they would even have refused to participate. Evidently some risk of disclosure was taken because it was not seen as a substantial risk.
Obviously the test was performed in part to obtain marketing information: how many housewives would want the product and what price they would pay. Evidently the test did nothing to discover the size of the potential consuming public or its ratio to the entire public. When asked if they *1139would buy, housewives had already tested the product and found it satisfactory, thus separating them as a discrete body from the mass of consumers. The test users, how collected or how representative of the entire public unknown, were all “female heads of households” age 18 to 60, who “had carpeting in living room, dining room, or den.” The test discovered that this sample, representative of a public of unknown size, would buy, if shown by a test in their own home, that they could put the product to a useful purpose. Thus the marketing testing and product testing aspects were inseparable and each was useless without the other. In those circumstances, how the court is able to find as a fact that the market testing aspect was primary, is beyond me.
When Mr. Fulton invented the steamboat, he had to test whether persons of ordinary education could feed his boiler and keep it producing steam, but not explode it, before he could test how many persons would want to ride up the Hudson to Albany as passengers. By my perception, the test at St. Louis paralleled the first, not the second, and was therefore a typical experimental use.
Inventors will feel compelled to run “female heads of houses in the age range of 18-60 years” through the laboratory instead of running the product through their homes serving as laboratories. The cost of such tests will be greater and the results less dependable. This decision, therefore, is one of the many disasters inflicted every year upon that unhappy target, the American consumer. It is not required by the cases cited and serves no discernible policy, either of the court or of the Congress that enacted the statute.
It is unnecessary to say much about the cases cited. The one most often referred to and a CCPA case binding as a precedent on us, is In Re Theis, 610 F.2d 786, 204 USPQ 188 (C.C.P.A.1979). The product there was actually sold to customers more than one year before the patent application. Some of the invoices bore the notation “6 months evaluation” but the court viewed the evaluation as possibly for the benefit of the customer, so he could return the product if it did not meet his needs. Presumably he would keep it if satisfied. The difference of this from the case at bar is obvious. The board relied very heavily on and calls an “all fours” precedent Omark Industries, Inc. v. Carlton Co., 652 F.2d 783, 212 USPQ 413 (9th Cir.1980). There, however, the product, a chain saw, was thoroughly tested by the company’s engineering department in the hands of selected typical users, and this was held to be a valid experimental use. Thereafter the sales department took over and arranged for further trials by users. These were held to be sales-oriented as no further awareness of design problems was sought or obtained. This court understandably does not rely on the board’s alleged “all fours” precedent. It is obvious the Omari court was willing to allow, as the board was not, an opportunity to try the product out in the hands of typical users, and the case should have embarrassed the board.
None of these cases involve the peculiar problems incident to perfecting a product to be used by housewives in the home in connection with their own variegated household appliances. It is the refusal to recognize the existence of these problems here that divorces the court from reality and produces a decision that will be quite harmful in its effect.
If the court must willy-nilly deny Smith and McLaughlin the benefit of their invention, it could find in the record grounds that are at once more plausible and less pernicious to the public weal.