Welsh Co. v. Chernivsky’s Empirical Analysis
342 F.2d 586 · 1965
Citation profile
13 federal appellate ·
Relationships
Relies on Sanitary Refrigerator Co. v. Winters · Loom Company v. Higgins · Goss v. Board of Education · Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Ray-O-Vac Co. · Expanded Metal Co. v. Bradford
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We think the root of the district court’s error was in considering Chernivsky’s claim 1, upon which his claims 2 and 3 rest, against the prior art piece by piece instead of considering the device totally, without properly applying the well-established principle that a combination of old elements in a manner that is unobvious to one skilled in the trade and which produces a new and useful result may be patented. [citations omitted]. Since a combination of old elements alone may be enough to constitute a patentable device, the addition of a new element to the combination should not, as the district court seemed to conclude, result in a limitation of the claims to the new element.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““In those cases the patented device contained only a single, limited improvement over a preexisting device in the prior art, and a broader construction of the claims than that allowed by the court would have rendered the patent invalid on the prior art. In the case before us, on the other hand, there was no single device in the prior art which embodied, except for the coupling device, all of the elements of the Chernivsky device.””
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.