Applegate v. Scherer’s Empirical Analysis
332 F.2d 571 · 1964
Citation profile
3 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently July 2020 · most notably Price v. Symsek (1993), Burroughs Wellcome Co. v. Barr Laboratories, Inc. (1994)
3 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
Applies 35 U.S.C. § 135
Relies on Marshall B. Alpert v. Harvey L. Slatin · Smith v. Bousquet · In re Tansel · Shumaker v. Paulson
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Plaintiff demonstrated in its brief before the Board of Patent Interferences that each clause of the interference count is applicable to Law’s write-up of November 15, 1948. Defendant does not deny this. But under the law, this does not suffice to establish conception. Law has failed to prove conception by 1948 or any other date prior to the RCA application filing date, because contrary to what plaintiff states on pages 21 and 22 of its main brief, further and different information was ‘needed in order to * * * enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to understand the invention and practice it.’ As will be shown later in this section, the experience of Law himself and his colleagues at RCA in attempting without success to find out how to carry out photodeposition of phosphors bears this out.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage““Appellants seem to propose that there cannot be a conception of an invention of the type here involved in the absence of knowledge that the invention will work. Such knowledge, necessarily, can rest only on an actual reduction to practice. To adopt this proposition would mean, as a practical matter, that one could never communicate an invention thought up by him to another who is to try it out, for, when the tester succeeds, the one who does no more than exercise ordinary skill would be rewarded and the innovator would not be. Such cannot be the law. A contrary intent is implicit in the statutes and in a multitude of precedents. “Thinking of the matter in this light and asking who made the invention, clearly it was Scherer who had the thought and not Applegate who merely made the test.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[T]he important distinction [between this case and Smith v. Bousquet] is that Smith and Bousquet were independent inventors pursuing their work separately, a situation which bears no parallel to the one here where one party communicated the totality of the invention defined in the count to the other, whether it be called a “conception” or by any other name.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.