Court Opinion

ID: 9419384
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:12.59113+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:42:07.419558
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting in part:
I regret to find myself unable to agree to the Court’s conclusion regarding the invalidity of the broad claims of Marconi’s patent. Since broad considerations control the significance and assessment of the details on which judgment in the circumstances of a case like this is based, I shall indicate the general direction of my views.
It is an old observation that the training of Anglo-American judges ill fits them to discharge the duties cast *61upon them by patent legislation.1 The scientific attainments of a Lord Moulton are perhaps unique in the annals of the English-speaking judiciary. However, so long as the Congress, for the purposes of patentability, makes the determination of originality a judicial function, judges must overcome their scientific incompetence as best they can. But consciousness of their limitations should make *62them, vigilant against importing their own notions of the nature of the creative process into Congressional legislation, whereby Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” has secured “for limited Times to . . . Inventors the exclusive Right to their . . . Discoveries.” Above all, judges must avoid the subtle temptation of taking scientific phenomena out of their contemporaneous setting and reading them with a retrospective eye.
The discoveries of science are the discoveries of the laws of nature, and like nature do not go by leaps. Even Newton and Einstein, Harvey and Darwin, built on the past and on their predecessors. Seldom indeed has a great discoverer or inventor wandered lonely as a cloud. Great inventions have always been parts of an evolution, the culmination at a particular moment of an antecedent process. So true is this that the history of thought records striking coincidental discoveries — showing that the new insight first declared to the world by a particular individual was “in the air” and ripe for discovery and disclosure.
The real question is how significant a jump is the new disclosure from the old knowledge. Reconstruction by hindsight, making obvious something that was not at all obvious to superior minds until someone pointed it out,— this is too often a tempting exercise for astute minds. The result is to remove the opportunity of obtaining what Congress has seen fit to make available.
The inescapable fact is that Marconi in his basic patent hit upon something that had eluded the best brains of the time working on the problem of wireless communication — Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge and Nikola Tesla. Genius is a word that ought to be reserved for the rarest of gifts. I am not qualified to say whether Marconi was a genius. Certainly the great eminence of Clerk Maxwell and Sir Oliver Lodge and Nikola Tesla *63in the field in which Marconi was working is not questioned. They were, I suppose, men of genius. The fact is that they did not have the “flash” (a current term in patent opinions happily not used in this decision) that begot the idea in Marconi which he gave to the world through the invention embodying the idea. But it is now held that in the important advance upon his basic patent Marconi did nothing that had not already been seen and disclosed.
To find in 1943 that what Marconi did really did not promote the progress of science because it had been anticipated is more than a mirage of hindsight. Wireless is so unconscious a part of us, like the automobile to the modern child, that it is almost impossible to imagine ourselves back into the time when Marconi gave to the world what for us is part of the order of our universe. And yet, because a judge of unusual capacity for understanding scientific matters is able to demonstrate by a process of intricate ratiocination that anyone could have drawn precisely the inferences that Marconi drew and that Stone hinted at on paper, the Court finds that Marconi’s patent was invalid although nobody except Marconi did in fact draw the right inferences that were embodied into a workable boon for mankind. Eor me it speaks volumes that it should have taken forty years to reveal the fatal bearing of Stone’s relation to Marconi’s achievement by a retrospective reading of his application to mean this rather than that. This is for me, and I say it with much diffidence, too easy a transition from what was not to what became.
I have little doubt, in so far as I am entitled to express an opinion, that the vast transforming forces of technology have rendered obsolete much in our patent law. For all I know the basic assumption of our patent law may be false, and inventors and their financial backers do not need the incentive of a limited monopoly to stimulate *64invention. But • whatever revamping our patent laws may need, it is the business of Congress'to do the revamping. ' We have neither constitutional authority ' nor scientific competence' for the task. ' ' ■ ■
Mr. Justice Roberts joins in this opinion.