In re Hack’s Empirical Analysis
1957
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently August 2008
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 1 state decisions
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 In re Thuau · Old Town Ribbon & Carbon Co. v. Columbia Ribbon & Carbon Mfg. Co. · In re Benner · Application of Craige
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“These cases are merely expressive of the principle that the grant of a patent on a composition or machine cannot be predicated on a new use of that machine or composition. We did not in those cases deny a patent to applicant because there was necessarily any lack of inventiveness in adapting the known composition to a new use. We recognize that it often requires perceptivity and intuitive genius of the highest order to grasp the idea that a device or material in one art may be utilized in another. The inventive faculties may be brought as fully into play in this regard as they would be in the creation of a device de novo. But a patent on an old product, based on its new use, has never been authorized by the patent laws which provided for patents only on a new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof (R.S. Sec. 4886). As declared in Old Town Ribbon & Carbon Co. v. Columbia Ribbon & Carbon Mfg. Co., Inc., 2 Cir., 159 F.2d 379, 382: '* * * it makes not the slightest difference how beneficial to the public the new function may be, how long a search it may end, how many may have shared that search, or how high a reach of imaginative ingenuity the solution may have demanded. All the mental factors which determine invention may have been present to the highest degree, but it will not be patentable because it will not be within the terms of the statute. * * *”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“a new use of a known process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter or material.”
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.