Deere & Company, and Cross-Appellant v. Hesston Corporation, and Cross-Appellee

593 F.2d 956, 201 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 444, 1979 U.S. App. LEXIS 16366
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
DecidedMarch 9, 1979
Docket77-1561, 77-1562
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 593 F.2d 956 (Deere & Company, and Cross-Appellant v. Hesston Corporation, and Cross-Appellee) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Deere & Company, and Cross-Appellant v. Hesston Corporation, and Cross-Appellee, 593 F.2d 956, 201 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 444, 1979 U.S. App. LEXIS 16366 (10th Cir. 1979).

Opinion

WILLIAM E. DOYLE, Circuit Judge.

I.

THE PLEADINGS AND PROCEEDINGS

Plaintiff-appellee Deere & Company instituted this action in the United States District Court for the District of Utah. A declaratory judgment to declare certain patents invalid was prayed for against the Hesston Corporation of Hesston, Kansas, the owner of United States Patent No. 3,556,327, entitled “Loose Hay Wagon,” issued January 19, 1971, and filed by Harold Keith Garrison April 14, 1969; also, United States Patent No. 3,728,849, entitled “Hay Loader,” issued April 24, 1973, on application filed November 14, 1969, by Ezra Cor-dell Lundahl.

From further allegations in the complaint it appears that Deere has designed and built a hay wagon, has exhibited it and offered it for sale at meetings of farm implement dealers, and is now manufacturing and selling in competition with a hay wagon manufactured and sold by Hesston, named StakHand.

*958 It is further alleged that Hesston notified Deere that it considered the Deere implement to have infringed on both the Garrison and Lundahl Patents. Deere maintains in furtherance of its complaint that the Garrison and Lundahl Patents are invalid and so not infringed; also, it maintains that the Garrison and Lundahl Patents were obtained through fraud on the Patent Office and that they are invalid because of the sale of a prototype of the hay loader in the Lundahl Patent.

The answer on behalf of the defendant-appellant denies the allegations as to the invalidity, fraud and prior sale of a prototype and contains a counterclaim alleging infringement. A supplemental counterclaim lists a series of Hesston Patents. These include those mentioned above together with improvement patents. 1

Plaintiff-appellee Deere has filed a reply to the fourth supplemental counterclaim as a result of which all matters are fully in issue.

This matter was tried to the court before United States District Judge Anderson, District of Utah, who ruled all eight patents of Hesston Corporation invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) and 35 U.S.C. § 103. The district court essentially ruled that the patents in issue were invalid because they were obvious as provided in 35 U.S.C. § 103 and because they were known to the public for more than one year before the patent application under § 102(b).

The trial court said that the controversy centered around four patents: Lundahl Patent No. 3,728,849, a haystacking method; Lundahl Patent No. 3,828,535, a haystacking machine (Lundahl I Patent and Lundahl II Patent, respectively). The other two primarily involved are the Garrison Patent No. 3,556,327, a haystaeking machine, and the Garrison Patent No. 3,847,072, a haystacking method (the Garrison I Patent and Garrison II Patent, respectively).

II.

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

This controversy had its origins in 1960 and the years following.

The Lundahls, Cordell and Ezra, son and father respectively, were engaged in the manufacture of loose hay wagons. Cordell, the son, saw the need for a machine that would transform loose hay into closely packed haystacks which could either be left in the field or moved to a storage place.

. Lundahl’s first machine was a simple wagon which compressed the hay. It was loaded by a machine known as a Farmhand grapple fork or a Farmhand. This latter was pulled by a tractor through the hay field where it would pick up loose hay and deposit it into the wagon. This wagon had high side walls and a front panel which moved toward the rear and in so doing compacted the hay against the rear doors. Lundahl discovered that this mechanism loaded the hay unevenly and without a uniform density. The result was disintegration of the hay stack. There were other deficiencies. The loading was a separate function; there was a lack of integrated method of pulling the wagon down the windrow. The operation was in two separate steps, in other words. After the loading there followed the horizontal compaction which was also in stages. Each time *959 some hay was loaded it had to be compressed and then more hay would be added and compressed until the wagon was filled. While producing one complete haystack, this process resulted in a stack which tended to separate and fall apart. To overcome this, Lundahl added vertical compression units consisting of two gate-like top presses which would be set as extensions of the side walls and would swing down from the top on hinges powered by hydraulic compressors. Notwithstanding this, though, the principal compression was the horizontal force created by compressing the crop against the back walls of the wagon.

In February 1966, Lundahl advertised in a farm journal a one-man automatic feeding system for long hay. While the advertisement said that the machine would stack and compress loose hay from the windrow into neat uniform stacks without any manual handling, at this time an integrated system had not been developed: The wagon still had to be loaded separately. One Warren DePuy purchased one of these incomplete machines. It lacked the attachment which would make the machine self-loading. This was promised at a later date. This is here referred to as the DePuy machine and it was put to use during the 1966 haying season and for part of the 1967 season, but had mechanical difficulties as a result of which DePuy sued the Lundahl Corporation for breach of warranty. After this the machine was abandoned by DePuy.

In 1966, the Hesston Corporation, defendant-appellant here, bought the assets of the Lundahl Corporation. 2 Hesston was very much interested in the stacking machine idea and pursued it through one of the engineers for Hesston, Keith Garrison, who worked with Cordell Lundahl on improving the design. Prior to this, Lundahl had come to the realization that vertical compaction was desirable. This led to the development of the swinging top-gates which came down on the loaded haywagon and also the addition of the tuckers to the undersides of the hinged gates on the earlier prototype. So the research was pursued along the line of developing the vertical compaction. Testing along this line continued through 1968 with several prototypes, including a 1966-67 prototype which redesigned top-presser gates integrated with a crop pick-up and distribution system. Eventually Garrison came up with a method of continuous loading of hay into a moving wagon by using the blower duct system with a dispersal mechanism which served to spread the hay evenly. Garrison also discarded the two-gate approach and adopted a single unit, described as an inverted U, which was used to apply downward pressure. These innovations were said to have produced “real good” results which yielded stacks of uniform density and having a self-supporting nature. Also, the stacks were better shaped from the standpoint of shedding water. This machine was ultimately marketed.

Hesston, in the year 1969, commenced the production of the StakHand 60, which made six ton stacks.

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593 F.2d 956, 201 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 444, 1979 U.S. App. LEXIS 16366, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/deere-company-and-cross-appellant-v-hesston-corporation-and-ca10-1979.