Court Opinion

ID: 9471574
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:35:54.811559+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:28.423675
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
with whom
ESCHBACH, Circuit Judge, joins, concurring and dissenting.
I agree that the judgment for Roberts cannot stand and I also agree that the method by which questions of fact pertaining to the validity of Roberts’ patent were put to the jury was incorrect. But I think the patent is obvious as a matter of law and therefore that the case should not be remanded for a new trial but ended now with an order to dismiss the complaint.
A socket wrench has two parts (see Figure 1): the shaft which the person using the wrench grasps and turns (labeled “10” in Figure 1), and a detachable socket (16) which grips the bolt that the wrench is turning. Usually the wrench comes with a number of sockets of different size so that a single wrench can be used to turn bolts of different width.
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The principle of the socket wrench is not new. The alleged novelty of the Roberts patent is in the mechanism, shown in Figure 2, for releasing the socket when the user of the wrench wants to change sockets. The knob (22) at the top is the pushbutton (also 22) on the back of the head of the wrench in Figure 1. Notice that the push-button is not depressed. In this, the locked position, the pin (20) to which the pushbutton is attached is pressing a little ball (18) against, and partially through, a ring in the wall of the mechanism. (The ball cannot fall out, because its diameter is greater than the ring’s.) The part of the ball that protrudes outside the ring (24) is lying in a depression in the inner wall of the socket (not shown in Figure 2), thereby holding the socket onto the wrench. If you press the pushbutton, this will force the pin down until the hollow space in it (26) is next to the ball, and the weight of the socket will then force the ball into that space. There will now be nothing holding the socket to the wrench, and the socket will fall of its own weight.
*1345[[Image here]]
This is the Roberts quick-release mechanism. It was a huge commercial success— though this may have owed a lot to Sears’ promotion and marketing of it — because it enabled changing sockets with one hand. By holding the wrench face downward and pushing the pushbutton with your thumb you can drop off the socket attached to the wrench; by keeping the button pressed down you can insert the wrench into a different socket simply by pressing the head of the wrench down onto that socket; and you can then lock the socket to the wrench simply by releasing your thumb.
Successful though it has been, the Roberts patent is invalid if “the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.” 35 U.S.C. § 103. The word “obvious” in the statute is not obvious. Its legal meaning must be derived from the policies that inform the patent statute. The purpose of allowing people to obtain patents is strictly utilitarian — to create incentives to invent useful things. “The patent monopoly was not designed to secure to the inventor his natural right in his discoveries. Rather, it was a reward, an inducement, to bring forth new knowledge.” Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 9, 86 S.Ct. 684, 689, 15 L.Ed.2d 545 (1966). Since new knowledge is a social good, it might seem that no limits should be placed on the scope or duration of patent protection. The problem is that patent protection has a dark side, to which the term “patent monopoly” is a clue. A patent enables its owner to monopolize the production of the things in which the patented idea is embodied. To deny that patent protection has this effect, the position that a footnote in the majority opinion attributes to the chief judge of the new patent appeals court, is — with all due respect — to bury one’s head in the sand. A patent excludes others from using thé patented invention except on the terms set by the patent owner. If the invention is a valuable one he will be able to charge a substantial royalty to manufacturers who want to usé it; and by increasing the cost of manufacture the royalty may well result in higher prices to consumers and a lower output of the manufactured product than if the invention were freely available to anyone who wanted to use it. See Scherer, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance 442, 450 (2d ed. 1980); Stigler, The Organization of Industry 123-25 (1968).
This is not to say that no patents should be granted. An invention might not be made (not so soon, anyway) unless the inventor could get a patent; for he might not be able to recoup his investment in the invention if anyone could use it without charge, and therefore might have no incentive to make the investment in the first place. In such a case granting a patent would increase rather than decrease the output of useful things. My point is only that the costs as well as benefits of patent protection are relevant to deciding which inventions should be patentable. The balance tips against protection when the invention is the sort that was likely to be made, and as soon, even if no one could have patented it. In such a case patent protection would have no good incentive effects but would have the usual bad monopoly effects. All this is well recognized in the law. The Supreme Court in the Graham case, referring to Thomas Jefferson’s views on patent policy, said it was “the underlying policy of the patent system that ‘the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent,’ as Jefferson put it, must outweigh the restrictive effect of the limited patent *1346monopoly. The inherent problem was to develop some means of weeding out those inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of a patent.” 383 U.S. at 10-11, 86 S.Ct. at 690.
The means chosen was the concept codified in the statutory term “obvious.” See id. at 11-17, 86 S.Ct. at 690-693. The term identifies the eases in which patent protection is not necessary to induce invention and would therefore visit the costs of monopoly on the consuming public with no offsetting gains. As Professor Kitch has explained, “the basic principle on which the non-obviousness test is based [is that] a patent should not be granted for an innovation unless the innovation would have been unlikely to have been developed absent the prospect of a patent.... The nonobviousness test makes an effort, necessarily an awkward one, to sort out those innovations that would not be developed absent a patent system.” Kitch, Graham v. John Deere Co.: New Standards for Patents, 1966 Sup.Ct.Rev. 293, 301. Now it is true that if the invention, though the sort of thing that ordinarily would be expected to take much time and toil to make, was made in a flash of genius, this does not make it “obvious.” That is the force of the last sentence of section 103 (“Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made”), as explained in the Reviser’s Note. Much time and toil may have been spent in getting to the point where the spark of genius could be struck, and in any event people should not be encouraged to do drudge work by making it a condition of obtaining patent protection. But if a court thinks an invention for which a patent is being sought would have been made as soon or almost as soon as it was made even if there were no patent laws, then it must pronounce the invention obvious and the patent invalid.
We should do that here. Roberts’ quick-release mechanism is simplicity itself and as one would expect its essential elements were already well known when it was invented. A man named Wendling had already patented the use of a pin and ball to hold a socket onto a wrench; his device lacked only the pushbutton. DePew had invented a mechanism for lifting heavy loads that worked like a socket wrench, with the load corresponding to the socket. A pin protruded from the top of the mechanism much like Roberts’ pushbutton and was moved up and down to release the old load and lock on a new one to the lifting mechanism. Gonzalez and Carpenter separately had patented socket wrenches that had the essential elements of the Roberts patent, although the emphasis was on the locking rather than the release function. Wilson had submitted a patent application for a quick-release socket wrench almost identical to Roberts’, though the application was abandoned and was not known to Roberts when he submitted his application.
The earlier patents and Wilson’s application show that the basic ideas embodied in Roberts’ patent were familiar ones. The idea that a socket could be locked to a wrench with a pin and ball device and that a pushbutton could be used to make the pin release one socket and lock in another was not new. The new thing was a device in which these ideas worked smoothly enough to allow sockets to be changed easily with one hand. That was Roberts’ contribution, but it was entitled to patent protection only if it was unlikely to be induced except by the promise of a monopoly; and it was not. Everyone knew that there was a market for a quick-release wrench and everyone knew the elements of such a wrench — the pin and ball for holding the socket in place and the pushbutton for releasing the old socket and locking in the new. It was a question of coming up with a workable embodiment of these ideas, a task for which no special training, expensive equipment, or prolonged testing and refining were necessary. Nor is it the case that anyone except Roberts would have needed all these things but that Roberts was a genius and could make the invention without the investments in human or physical capital that others would have had to make. In the circumstances disclosed by this record, the probable effect of patent protection is to overcompensate the inventor, thereby drawing excessive resources into the making of minor improvements and imposing unnecessary costs of monopoly on the community.
*1347I know that many lawyers and judges find the language of economies repulsive. Yet the policies that have given shape to the patent statute are quintessential^ economic, and the language of economics is therefore the natural language in which to articulate the test for obviousness. And, with all due respect, I do not think the majority has succeeded very well in articulating an alternative test. Its opinion recites a number of general propositions about the meaning of obviousness. These propositions are quite unexceptionable but as is so often true the general principles that no one disagrees with do not decide the concrete case. Consider for example the statement in the majority opinion that “Simplicity is not to be equated with obviousness.” I have no quarrel with this statement, though I would if the statement were “Simplicity is not probative of obviousness.” But it is interesting to note that in the case the majority opinion cites for the proposition, Skee-Trainer, Inc. v. Garelick Mfg. Co., 361 F.2d 895, 899 (8th Cir.1966), the patent was held invalid on the ground of obviousness. The patented device was a water-skiing aid which the court held should have been “obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art” even though “nothing comparable to it ha[d] previously been constructed.” Id. My brethren do not explain why if that device, or the mechanical devices held to be obvious as a matter of law in the Graham case, or the inventions held to be nonpatentable because of obviousness in other cases cited in the majority’s opinion, such as Republic Industries v. Schlage Lock Co., 592 F.2d 963, 975 (7th Cir.1979); Popeil Bros. v. Schick Elec., Inc., 494 F.2d 162, 167 (7th Cir.1974); Shelco, Inc. v. Dow Chem. Co., 466 F.2d 613, 616-17 (7th Cir.1972), and Deep Welding, Inc. v. Sciaky Bros., 417 F.2d 1227, 1239 (7th Cir.1969), are obvious, the Roberts wrench is not.
Because the majority opinion both confines itself to generalities in setting forth its test of obviousness and does not apply its test to the facts of this case, I am not clear whether its test differs other than verbally from my own. But whether it is the same test or a different test, a better test or a worse test, I am at a loss to understand why the court is unwilling to use it to decide this case once and for all, rather than remand for another trial. I think appellate courts are sometimes too hesitant to bite the bullet and dispatch a litigation that has gone on for too long. This is such a case.
All of us agree that the ultimate question of obviousness is for the court, not the jury, and that the jury’s role is limited to deciding subsidiary fact questions, of the who-did-what-to-whom variety. Dual Mfg. & Engineering, Inc. v. Burris Industries, 619 F.2d 660, 662-64 (7th Cir.1980) (en banc). The only such question here is whether either Carpenter’s or Gonzalez’s design would allow the socket to be released with one hand, or stated differently whether once the pushbutton is pressed gravity will do the rest. (The reason there is uncertainty on this score is that neither wrench was placed in the record. The Gonzalez wrench was never even manufactured. A prototype of the Carpenter wrench may have been manufactured — the record is unclear on the point — but the wrench was never sold on the market.) Logically, before we can decide whether this question requires that a properly instructed jury be allowed to take a whack at this case before we do, we must decide whether the Roberts patent would be valid if the jury found that neither the Carpenter nor the Gonzalez design would have allowed a user to release sockets with one hand. If Roberts’ patent would not be valid even on this assumption, a new trial would be an exercise in futility.
The court does not say whether it would be valid. I believe it would not be. The question is not whether the Roberts wrench was identical to something that had been invented earlier, but whether the advance that it made over the prior art was sufficiently great to deserve a patent. And in making that judgment we must consider not just Carpenter and Gonzalez, but Wendling, DePew, and Wilson. All five had the essential elements of the Roberts wrench. The Carpenter and Gonzalez wrenches may indeed have been completely identical to the Roberts wrench in their operating characteristics; but, at worst, they were clumsier versions that did not lend themselves to *1348changing sockets with one hand. Resolving all disputed factual issues in Roberts’ favor, all one can say is that he used a familiar technology to make a' wrench that was easier to use with one hand than its predecessors. This was “the work of a skillful mechanic” rather than of an inventor. Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248, 267, 13 L.Ed. 683 (1851); Republic Industries v. Schlage Lock Co., supra, 592 F.2d at 975.
Obviously the majority must attach more weight than I do to the question how easy it would be to release sockets with one hand with a Carpenter or a Gonzalez wrench, if such a wrench existed. But I find it particularly difficult to agree that the question warrants a new trial in a litigation already so dated and stale as this one is. It began almost 15 years ago, in 1969, and if the judgment entered by the district court on remand from this court is appealed the appeal will not come back to us but will go to another court, the new United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which no doubt will have its own ideas about this interesting case. (I will not speculate on the applicability of the law of the case doctrine in this unusual situation, or on whether if it is applicable it would have any bite in view of the lack of definiteness in the legal standard which this court has laid down in its opinion.) This could turn into a 20-year lawsuit over a patent that has now expired. We have too much protracted litigation in the federal courts. Three appeals in this case are enough.
Age is just one reason why I also believe that it was inappropriate to prolong this suit by agreeing to rehear the appeal en banc. This circuit grants rehearing en banc very rarely; this is only our nineteenth en banc decision in the last five years, an average of fewer than four a year. The basic reason for this parsimony is that a rehearing en banc imposes a heavy burden on an already overburdened court. “The heavy costs of the en banc procedure in terms of court time and litigant expense should establish a strong presumption against its use in most cases, rebuttable only by clearly demonstrable benefits.” Note, En Banc Review in Federal Circuit Courts: A Reassessment, 72 Mich.L.Rev. 1637, 1645 (1974). This implies and we have stated that “the function of en banc hearings is not to review alleged errors for the benefit of losing litigants.” United States v. Rosciano, 499 F.2d 173, 174 (7th Cir.1974) (per curiam). In other words, rehearing en banc should (in all but the rarest circumstances) be reserved for cases that have precedential significance, which this case does not. For we have lost our. jurisdiction over patent appeals except for the tiny handful of cases in which the notice of appeal was filed before October 1, 1982, but in which no decision has yet been rendered. The Federal Circuit, which has acquired exclusive jurisdiction of patent appeals, has announced that it will not be bound by decisions of the other circuits. South Corp. v. United States, 690 F.2d 1368, 1371 (Fed.Cir.1982) (en banc). So the panel decision in this case, even if unsound, would still have been harmless, because it would have had no weight as precedent; and Judge Wood’s painstakingly crafted en banc opinion, the work of many months, will, have no weight as precedent either. I respectfully suggest that we cannot afford to waste judicial resources in this fashion.