Packwood v. Briggs & Stratton Corp.
| Decision Date | 23 April 1952 |
| Docket Number | No. 10583.,10583. |
| Citation | 195 F.2d 971 |
| Parties | PACKWOOD v. BRIGGS & STRATTON CORP. et al. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit |
Ira Milton Jones, Milwaukee, Wis. (Arthur G. Connolly, Wilmington, Del., on the brief), for appellants.
Brown Morton, Jr., New York City (Thomas Cooch, Wilmington, Del., John E. Hubbell, New York City, on the brief), for appellee.
Before KALODNER and HASTIE, Circuit Judges, and MODARELLI, District Judge.
In a patent infringement suit a jury found plaintiff's patent valid and infringed by defendants. Thereafter, the trial judge, while candidly stating his own conviction that the patent was invalid for lack of invention, denied defendants' motion for judgment n. o. v., reasoning that he had no authority to substitute his judgment on the contested issue of invention for that of the jury. On this appeal we have to decide whether this deliberate self restraint was error or proper deference to the role and action of the jury.
In essence, the alleged invention is a rotating screen for use on power lawn mowers which operates to arrest and by centrifugal force to deflect grass and other foreign particles from the entrance to the aircooling system of the motor.1 It was stipulated, however, that the design of power mowers with fixed screens, admittedly identical with rotating screens in their common function of keeping the air stream free from debris, is prior art as to the patent in suit. Rotating screens are fastened to the fan shaft, fixed ones, to the fan casing, these being the only two practicable points of attachment. "The invention", to sum up in the words of counsel for plaintiff, "In a narrow sense was the addition to the already existing engine of this screen, or * * * changing the fastening of the screen from its outer periphery, where it was fastened to the shroud opening fan casing, to the pulley where it was fastened to the pulley fan shaft * * *." The rotating screen, moreover, in point of uncontradicted evidence, differs neither in its ultimate purpose, its means of execution, nor in its method of attachment, from the Knight patent, No. 1,789,871, issued fifteen years prior to application by Packwood for the patent in suit. The Packwood screen is designed to divert "light weight particles such as leaf and paper fragments", "severed grass blades", and "small", "light" or "moist" "bodies", the Knight screen, "particles of dust or abrasive material" and "heavier than air particles"; both screens accomplish their purpose by centrifugal force; and both are secured to the rotating fan shaft of an internal combustion engine.
With the foregoing facts established at the trial below, what survived, by way of novelty or advance over prior art, upon which to predicate a finding of invention in the Packwood screen? If anything remained, it could only be the novelty of the combination of elements in lawn mowers or the mechanical adaptation of a rotating screen for use in power mowers specifically, as opposed to internal combustion engines generally. The jury apparently concluded that the skill and ingenuity involved in this adaptation of a familiar combination constituted invention for it brought in a verdict that plaintiff's patent is "valid as to lawn mowers only".
This finding of invention and validity was very clearly wrong. A jury in a patent case is not free to treat invention as a concept broad enough to include whatever discovery or novelty may impress the jurors favorably. Over the years the courts of the United States, and particularly the Supreme Court, have found meaning implicit in the scheme and purpose of the patent laws which aids in the construction of their general language. In this process, rules and standards have been developed for use as guides to the systematic and orderly definition and application of such a conception as invention in accordance with what the courts understand to be the true meaning of the Constitution and the patent laws. Once such standards and rules are authoritatively announced any finding of "invention" whether by a court or a jury must be consistent with them.
This is no peculiarity of patent law. Jury findings of negligence or proximate cause must comport with common law rules devised to give reasonable and systematic meaning to those generalities. For such rules, see Restatement of the Law, Torts, Negligence, Chs. 12-16. And so it is throughout the body of the common law. This authority and responsibility to keep jury findings within reasoned rules and standards is an essential function of United States judges today as it long has been of common law judges. See Capital Traction Co....
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