Griffith Rubber Mills v. Hoffar’s Empirical Analysis
313 F.2d 1 · 1963
Citation profile
42 federal appellate · 5 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 60 later decisions — most recently January 1996 · most notably Walker v. General Motors Corp. (1966), Bentley v. Sunset House Distributing Corp. (1966)
42 federal appellate · 5 district ·
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp. · Sinclair & Carroll Co. v. Interchemical Corp. · Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co. · Julia Hotchkiss Executrix of John Hotchkiss Deceased John Davenport and John Quincy v. Miles Greenwood · Smith v. Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Co.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 60 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Patents are issued not for private benefit but for the public good; they grant a monopoly for a limited period as an incentive to the disclosure of innovations which in the end will add to the fund of freely available knowledge. However, the public is entitled to benefit, without granting special concessions, from such advances as normally flow from the application of the ordinary skills of one in the trade to the existing fund of public knowledge. Thus the statute prescribes, as a condition of patent-ability, that what has been accomplished must be such that it would not have been obvious to a hypothetical person skilled in all that could have been known, at the pertinent time, in the field to which the invention relates. “It follows that though a device may be new and useful it is not patentable if it consists of no more than a combination of ideas which are drawn from the existing fund of public knowledge, and which produces results that would be expected by one skilled in the art.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““The improvement of one element or part in a combination of old elements or parts does not entitle a patentee to a monopoly on the entire combination. * * * A patent should not be granted for the discovery of a result which would flow naturally from the teachings of the prior art. * * * The extended application or the carrying forward of an earlier idea or conception of another involving a change in form, material, proportion or degree where the same work is performed in substantially the same way by substantially the same means although with better results, does not constitute invention. Mere advance in efficiency and utility is not sufficient to convert a noninventive aggregation of old elements and parts into a patentable combination. * * * Minor differences in design and construction of a patented device over the prior art, involving no new principles and accomplishing nothing more than one skilled in the art could readily discern, do not amount to invention. * * * “ * * * the ingenious application of known principles to a known problem by the use of devices already known and understood to produce a predictable result does not amount to invention. * * * ””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“The rule is the same where the `invention' consists solely or in part of the substitution of one known substance for another theretofore used for the purpose. (Footnote omitted) Selection from among available materials of one material thought more suitable for a particular use is normally within the competence of the person of ordinary skill in the art, and, generally, is for that reason not patentable. Nothing is added to the sum of public knowledge when a known material is used to perform functions or produce results which could be reasonably foreseen from the material's known characteristics. As in the case of other combinations of ideas drawn from existing knowledge, the old elements, including the known material in the new use, must perform additional and different functions in the combination than out of it; the results must be unusual and surprising — more must be derived from the combination than that which might be reasonably expected as the sum of the old ideas drawn from the public domain.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.