Ramirez v. Perez
Decision Date | 24 March 1972 |
Docket Number | No. 71-2073.,71-2073. |
Citation | 457 F.2d 267 |
Parties | Miguel A. RAMIREZ, Sr., Individually, and Maret, Inc., a corporation, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Antonio PEREZ, Individually, and d/b/a La Mexicana Tortilla Company, and Heliodoro Valadez, Individually, Defendants-Appellees. |
Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
Marshall I. Yaker, H. Tati Santiesteban, Paxson & Santiesteban, El Paso, Tex., for plaintiffs-appellants.
Robert T. Schwarzbach, Harry Lee Hudspeth, El Paso, Tex., for defendants-appellees.
Before BELL, AINSWORTH and GODBOLD, Circuit Judges.
Miguel A. Ramirez, Sr. and his family-owned corporation, Maret, Inc., sued defendants Antonio Perez and Heliodoro Valadez alleging that they had infringed Ramirez' United States Patent No. 2,980,012, covering a machine designed for the preparation of dough products, and particularly of flour tortillas.1 The parties compete in the tortilla business in essentially the same area, both having their base of operations in El Paso, Texas. Perez admitted that he had developed a machine which achieved the same result as that of Ramirez, but denied that his machine infringed plaintiff's patent. Alternatively, Perez alleged that if it did infringe, plaintiff's patent was invalid.
The dispute is before us for the second time. In the first appeal, we remanded the cause to the District Court with directions to enter appropriate findings of fact and conclusions of law. Ramirez v. Perez, 5 Cir., 1971, 440 F.2d 1072. The District Court complied with findings and conclusions on April 22, 1971.2 On May 3, 1971, complainants moved the Court to file additional findings of fact. The Court amended its findings of fact and entered additional finding No. 6. On May 18, 1971, the Court rendered a judgment which contained further findings of fact. The judgment denied all relief to plaintiffs, declared the Ramirez patent invalid "insofar as it contemplates a hot plate system for the processing of flour products," and declared the Perez patent invalid to the same extent. No findings or conclusions were entered on the issue of infringement. Ramirez and Maret appealed from the judgment of May 18, 1971. We modify and affirm, and vacate in part.
We consider first whether appellant Ramirez' patent was valid. See Inject-O-Meter Mfg. Co. v. North Plains Fertilizer & Co., Inc., 5 Cir., 1971, 439 F.2d 1138, 1139; Beckman Instruments, Inc. v. Chemtronics, Inc., 5 Cir., 1970, 428 F.2d 555, 557. Cf. Brose v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 5 Cir., 1971, 455 F.2d 769; Marvin Glass & Associates v. Sears, Roebuck and Company, 5 Cir., 1971, 448 F.2d 60. In 1954, Ramirez began to develop a machine for preparing dough products which was particularly adapted to the manufacture of flour tortillas. The genesis of his idea was an ordinary waffle iron. On October 9, 1958, he filed his application with the United States Patent Office. Plaintiff's machine embodied a means of mechanically conveying a measured amount of dough through the machine onto a hot plate. The dough was then compressed by a second hot plate for timed precooking and shaping. The formed tortilla was then mechanically removed from the bottom hot plate and transferred by conveyor belt to an oven for cooking. On April 18, 1961, the United States Patent Office issued United States Patent No. 2,980,012 to Ramirez and he began to manufacture and sell tortillas through his corporation.
The Ramirez patent is a "combination" patent, not a "pioneer" patent. The combined elements of his patent are revealed in Claim 1, which is typical of the other claims:
Article 1, § 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by granting monopolies to inventors for limited periods of time. The patent standard is basically constitutional. Anderson's-Black Rock, Inc. v. Pavement Salvage Co., 396 U.S. 57, 61, 90 S.Ct. 305, 308, 24 L.Ed.2d 258 (1969). The Patent Act of 1952, 35 U.S.C. § 1 et seq., implements the constitutional standard by making patent validity dependent upon three conditions: (1) novelty, (2) utility, and (3) nonobviousness. 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102, 103. See Graham v. John Deere Company of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1, 86 S.Ct. 684, 15 L.Ed.2d 545 (1966); Hobbs v. United States, Atomic Energy Commission, 5 Cir., 1971, 451 F.2d 849. Appellant's machine is useful. Among other things, it has brought tortilla manufacturing into the machine age. However, the District Court correctly found that the machine was not "new," 35 U.S.C. § 101, and
With regard to nonobviousness, 35 U.S.C. § 103 provides in pertinent part:
Id. at 512. In its original findings of fact and conclusions of law, the District Court found that application of the principle of two heated plates being brought together to compress and partially cook a flour tortilla "would have been obvious to a person reasonably skilled in the art, and was thus unpatentable." Furthermore, the Court found that "to one skilled in the art, the use of old and existing elements in combination was not an `invention' by the obvious-nonobvious standard." These conclusions are not clearly erroneous....
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