Mead Digital Systems, Inc. v. A.B. Dick Co., s. 82-3163
| Decision Date | 08 December 1983 |
| Docket Number | Nos. 82-3163,82-3178,s. 82-3163 |
| Citation | 723 F.2d 455,221 USPQ 1035 |
| Parties | MEAD DIGITAL SYSTEMS, INC.; Mead Corporation, Plaintiff-Appellee, Defendant-Appellee, Cross-Appellant, v. A.B. DICK COMPANY and Gould, Inc., Defendants-Appellants, Plaintiffs-Appellants, Cross-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Howard P. Krisher, David C. Greer, Bieser, Greer & Landis, Dayton, Ohio, Dugald S. McDougall, argued, Keith V. Rockey, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellants, plaintiffs-appellants, cross-appellees.
Armistead W. Gilliam, Smith & Schnacke, Dayton, Ohio, Bill Durkee, argued, Edward W. Goldstein, Arnold, White & Durkee, Houston, Tex., for plaintiff-appellee, defendant-appellee, cross-appellant.
Before KEITH and MERRITT, Circuit Judges, WISEMAN, * District Judge.
This patent infringement case concerns a new form of printing whereby printer's ink is guided onto paper or other recording media by electrical charges applied to ink streaming from small nozzles, rather than by conventional type, press, pen or other contact. The process, called "ink jet printing," is now used by businesses which require high speed printing or printing on soft or other unusual surfaces. Ink jet printers are particularly well-suited for computer print-outs and labeling. The parties to this action advise us that ink jet printing may be the "wave of the future" and that our decision in the case will control the interpretation of key patents in this expanding industry.
A.B. Dick Company ("A.B. Dick"), the owner of the "Sweet" patent, U.S. Patent No. 3,596,275 issued on July 27, 1971, and the exclusive licensee under the "Lewis-Brown" patent, U.S. Patent No. 3,298,030 issued on January 10, 1967, and Gould, Inc. ("Gould"), the owner of the Lewis-Brown patent, assert that the DIJIT printer, manufactured by the Mead Corporation ("Mead"), infringes these two patents. In a well-considered opinion, District Judge Walter Rice 1 concluded inter alia that the Lewis-Brown patent is invalid and that the DIJIT printer does not infringe the Sweet patent. 2 Mead Digital Systems, Inc. v. A.B. Dick Co., 521 F.Supp. 164 (S.D.Ohio 1981).
The District Court rested its determination of non-infringement largely on the grounds that the Sweet patent is limited to oscillography--the recording of waveforms of electrical signals. Appellants strongly contest this construction of the Sweet patent. While conceding that the illustrative embodiments of the patent depict only oscillographs, they argue that claims 1 3 and 33 4 of the Sweet patent, the claims in issue, disclose a method and apparatus for recording a wide variety of images, including alphanumeric characters.
In order to prevail on this issue, appellants, as we see it, must satisfactorily answer two related questions. First, if the Sweet patent contemplated calligraphy as well as oscillography and in application could compose characters as well as curved lines, why does not the patent say so directly and explain the process unambiguously? Why is this claim left unclear if it was intended? Second, if the Sweet patent claimed high speed character writing and needed no significant improvement or fundamental change to do so, why did Sweet join with Dr. Cumming, his supervisor, in subsequently filing a second, separate patent application disclosing a more advanced multiple ink jet system clearly designed for high speed character writing?
Appellants have failed to answer these questions satisfactorily and have failed to carry their burden of proof on the issues. The Mead DIJIT printer, which is based on the very patent application filed by Sweet with his supervisor after the original Sweet application was filed, is a substantial improvement over the invention disclosed in the Sweet patent.
Since we also agree with the District Court that the Lewis-Brown patent is invalid for obviousness, we affirm.
Many large and small steps of discovery in physics and electricity from the Nineteenth Century forward have led to the modern practice of ink jet printing. These steps include Michael Faraday's experiments in 1831 in electromagnetic induction and Lord Rayleigh's discovery in 1897 that a stream of liquid droplets issuing from a nozzel can be made uniform in size and spacing by applying cyclic energy or vibrations to the droplets as they form at the nozzle orifice.
C.R. Winston was the first person to incorporate these longstanding discoveries into a commercially successful ink jet printer. His device, patented in 1962 (U.S. Patent No. 3,060,429) and marketed as the Teletype Inktronic, recorded information by forming a single-file train of ink droplets that were imprinted with a uniform electrical charge. The droplets were directed between a pair of "deflection plates" which received variable electrical signals from an input source. The interaction of the constant charge placed on the droplet with the variable charge placed on the deflection plates caused the droplets to be deflected, the magnitude and direction of deflection depending on the charge placed on the deflection plates. After leaving the deflection field, the droplets travelled along their programed trajectories to a recording medium, usually paper, that passed under the nozzle and deflecting apparatus.
Although the Winston device was able to print alphanumeric characters, it could operate only at relatively slow speeds, since only one droplet could be present in the deflection field at a time. If a trailing droplet entered the deflection field before the leading droplet exited, the trailing droplet would be deflected along the identical trajectory as the leading droplet, since all droplets received identical charges and their trajectories were determined by the charge placed on the deflection plates when the droplets were present in the deflection field.
In 1961 Richard G. Sweet, then an electrical engineer conducting research at Stanford University, received as a gift an aquarium equipped with a device that sent bubbles through the water to provide oxygen to the inhabitants of the aquarium. Sweet's scientific curiosity got the best of him, and he set out to determine how oxygen was transferred from the bubbles to the water. The pursuit of this inquiry led eventually to U.S. Patent No. 3,596,275, the Sweet patent, by all accounts a monumental step in the march toward commercial application of ink jet printing concepts.
The apparatus disclosed in Sweet's patent controlled the trajectory of the ink droplets by maintaining a constant voltage on the deflection plates and placing a variable voltage on the droplets, the opposite of the system used by Winston. Attached as Appendix A is one of the illustrative embodiments included in the Sweet patent. This arrangement permitted Sweet's device to operate much faster than Winston's; several droplets, each encoded with its own "signal" charge, could be present in the constantly-charged deflection field at the same time. Indeed, the operational speed of Sweet's device was limited only by the rate at which the droplets could be formed. Sweet found that he could generate as many as 120,000 droplets per second, resulting in a recording speed hundreds of times faster than the Winston device could achieve.
The parties have paid particular attention to the direction of deflection disclosed in the Sweet patent. 5 Claim 1 of the patent teaches that "charged droplets are deflected laterally" while claim 33 discloses an apparatus for causing charged droplets "to follow trajectories that are a function of the amount of charge on said droplets." 6 The District Court concluded that these claims are ambiguous in that the terms "laterally" and "trajectories" are meaningless without a reference plane. 521 F.Supp. at 174. The District Court resolved this perceived ambiguity by examining the illustrative embodiments, specifications, and the prosecution history of the patent and, on the basis of this examination, concluded that the claims disclose only deflection in a direction transverse to the movement of the recording medium relative to the nozzle. Id.
Appellants vigorously dispute this conclusion. They argue that the term "laterally" in claim 1 means "laterally to the initial droplet direction" and that the term "trajectories" in claim 33 does not address the direction of deflection.
Upon hearing of Sweet's work in late 1962, Arling D. Brown and Arthur M. Lewis of Brush Instruments added a character or function generator to Sweet's droplet-printing device thereby enabling the device to print alphanumeric characters. Attached as Appendix B is one of the illustrative embodiments included in the Lewis-Brown patent. Character generators are devices which are able to "store" letters and numerals and to send to the charging electrodes voltage signals corresponding to the letters and numerals. Messages, consisting of a predetermined sequence of letters and numerals, are sent to the character generator which translates the message to a series of voltage signals and then relays the translated message to the charging electrodes which then charge the appropriate droplets to the appropriate level thereby causing the message to be printed.
The first Lewis-Brown application was filed on September 25, 1964. 7 Two further applications were filed during 1965; both contained essentially the same disclosures as the initial application. After a brief prosecution, the Lewis-Brown patent issued on January 10, 1967, and A.B. Dick became the exclusive licensee under it.
After the Lewis-Brown patent issued, Sweet, whose application was pending, copied claims from the Lewis-Brown patent in order to provoke an interference proceeding between himself and Lewis and Brown. After a lengthy interference process, the Patent Office Board of...
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