Court Opinion

ID: 9453622
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:19:15.883799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:44.242963
License: Public Domain

KIRKPATRICK, Judge
(concurring).
I am in agreement with the result. I am, however, unable to agree that the claims can properly be held unpatentable for the reason that the process they define is an old one, which was the only ground upon which the majority has affirmed the decision of the board. The board had affirmed the examiner’s rejection upon this ground and also on the ground that the invention is unpat-entable because for a method of doing business. This latter reason as given by the board is amply supported by authority and I think that the court should place its conclusion upon that ground and not upon the other.
The majority opinion reaches its conclusion solely upon judicial notice of a “common practice of wide notoriety * * * for retail outlets to list by code or otherwise various items stocked for sale, together with the price assigned to each item, so as to enable the clerk or sales person to ascertain the charge to the customer.” I am aware of the fact that the limits of judicial notice, particularly in patent cases, are expanding and the field of notice is now pretty broad. However, I think that the majority goes beyond today’s limits in placing its decision solely upon judicial notice of the above quoted practice. Of course, everyone knows that large department stores and supermarkets must have some system of recording prices of the various articles which they have for sale and keeping their sales people informed of such prices and of changes in them made from time to time. There may be any number of different ways of doing this, and, any number of different systems and I do not see how, without any evidence, we can use the doctrine of judicial notice to find that a system exists which anticipates that of the application or is so nearly like it as to make the application an obvious variation. That, it seems to me, is what we would have to. do in order to sustain the conclusion reached by the majority. Without some concrete evidence of the prior art (of which there is none) I do not think that it is possible to find that the system of this application is old or that it is obvious under Section 103.1
' For my part, I do not see how I could join in an opinion in which I would be taking judicial notice of business practices of which I have not the slightest knowledge or experience. For example, the fact stated by the majority that “in many drug and hardware stores today are tube testing machines having a cabinet full of tubes marked only by a code designation and an associated retail price list correlating the retail price to the code designation.” I would want some evidence of this practice before I would base rejection of an application for a patent upon it.
I would place the affirmance of the board’s decision upon the ground that the application discloses merely a method of doing business and is therefore for an unpatentable invention.

. There was one reference cited before the examiner (Rogal et al., U.S. Patent No. 1,801,981). The board held that that reference would not sustain the examiner’s rejection of the claims as obvious and it did not enter into the board’s decision.