Application of Klaus Hafner

410 F.2d 1403, 56 C.C.P.A. 1424
CourtCourt of Customs and Patent Appeals
DecidedJune 5, 1969
DocketPatent Appeal 8126
StatusPublished
Cited by24 cases

This text of 410 F.2d 1403 (Application of Klaus Hafner) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Customs and Patent Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Application of Klaus Hafner, 410 F.2d 1403, 56 C.C.P.A. 1424 (ccpa 1969).

Opinion

RICH, Judge.

This appeal is from the decision of the Patent Office Board of Appeals affirming the rejection of claims 1, 3, and 4 of application serial No. 384,782, filed July 23, 1964, entitled “New Aldehydes of the Fulvene Series and New Processes of Preparing the Same.” No claim has been allowed.

This case comes to us with the following somewhat involved but important background. On August 17, 1959, appellant filed two German applications, one relating to certain fulvene derivatives and thei other to certain cyclopen-tadiene derivatives. By appellant’s admission, neither German application contained any disclosure of utility, such disclosure having been unnecessary in Germany. On August 1, 1960, within one year of the German filings, appellant filed a U. S. application 1 (the “parent” of the instant application) combining the two German disclosures. A claim of priority was made and the necessary certified copies of the German applications were filed. Although the parent application alleged that the claimed compounds are useful as intermediates for preparing certain artificial resins and indicated a manner in which such resins can be prepared, all claims were finally rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 112 because of an alleged failure of the specification to disclose how those resins might be put to use.

On April 27, 1961, during the pendency of the parent application, one of appellant’s two German applications (hereinafter referred to as “Hafner”) was published. 2 More than one year thereafter, on July 24, 1964, the instant continuation-in-part application was filed. It contains a reference to the parent application, and a claim for priority going back to the German application was made at the time of filing. The instant application contains an amplified disclosure of utility and “how to use,” the adequacy of which, under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and § 112 respectively, has not been questioned.

All the appealed claims stand rejected as being “fully met (35 USC 102)” by both Hafner and an article published in May 1960 by one Arnold. 3 Assuming that these two references are valid § 102 references and considering their respective dates and the filing dates of appellant’s two German and two U. S. applications, the instant application must be entitled to the parent application’s U. S. filing date to overcome Hafner and the convention filing date of the German applications to overcome Arnold.

Until his brief before this court, appellant conceded that

* * * the claims are met by * * * Hafner and * * * Arnold * * * *1405 if the present application is not entitled to rely upon the filing date of the parent application * * * and through it to * * * [Hafner].

Now, however, appellant urges that these references do not qualify as “enabling” disclosures 4 because they allegedly, do not “teach the public ‘how to use’ the invention * * Appellant also maintains that

* * * the Patent Office is at once inconsistent and unfair in holding that the Arnold disclosure and the Hafner disclosure * * * “fully meet” the appealed claims, and that the disclosure in the parent application which is even better than that in the Hafner reference fails to support the claims on appeal.

In essence, appellant is contending that a double standard should not be applied in determining the adequacy of a disclosure to anticipate under § 102, on the one hand, and to support the patent-ability of a claim under § 112 on the other. He feels that a disclosure adequate for the one purpose is necessarily adequate for the other but, unhappily for him, this is not so. As we shall develop, a disclosure lacking a teaching of how to use a fully disclosed compound 5 for a specific, substantial utility or of how to use for such purpose a compound produced by a fully disclosed process is, under the present state of the law, entirely adequate to anticipate a claim to either the product or the process and, at the same time, entirely inadequate to support the allowance of such a claim. 6 This is so because of the requirements of law engrafted on sections 101 and 112 by the decision of the Supreme Court in Brenner v. Manson, 383 U.S. 519, 86 S.Ct. 1033, 16 L.Ed.2d 69 (1966), with respect to the meaning to be given to the words “useful” and “use” in those sections. In construing them, we must of course, give them the meaning demanded by the Supreme Court. 7

Standing alone, appellant’s argument against a double standard is a plausible proposition. However, when considered in light of the specific provisions of § 102, and § 112 as it has been interpreted, it is seen to. be untenable — § 112 provides that the specification must enable one skilled in the art to “use” the invention whereas § 102 makes no such requirement as to an anticipatory disclosure. The disclosure of how to use must relate to a use of the kind considered by the Supreme Court in Brenner v. Manson to be a sufficient utility. The majority of this court has spoken in Kirk and Joly, supra note 7, as to its construction of the Manson requirement. Thus, the double standard which appellant criticizes is now, implicitly if not explicitly, required by law, at least in situations such as we have here, although the “invention” per se claimed is fully disclosed and though the manner of “making,” as distinguished from “using,” the invention is also fully disclosed or is obvious.

Returning now to the question of appellant’s right to his claims of priority, the examiner held appellant not entitled to the filing date of either his German applications or his parent U. S. application because the latter allegedly did not comply with § 112 (as required by § 120) in that the “how to use” requirement of § 112 was not met.

*1406 The only “how to use” disclosure in the parent application reads:

The new products are valuable intermediate products especially for preparing artificial resins and plastic masses such as unsaturated linear or cross-linked long-chained acetal resins or mixed acetal-polyester resins which may be copolymerized with monomeric vinyl compounds such as styrene or diallylphthalate.

The examiner and; board were of the view that, although persons skilled in the art might well have no difficulty preparing acetal resins from the compounds of appellant’s invention, the parent application disclosure was still inadequate under § 112 because there is no express disclosure of a specific use to which the resulting resins can be put, and appellant has not shown that such a use would be obvious.

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Bluebook (online)
410 F.2d 1403, 56 C.C.P.A. 1424, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/application-of-klaus-hafner-ccpa-1969.