In previous posts (here, here, here, and here), I discussed a significant ancillary battle in the GE-Mitsubishi wind patent war. In this entertaining sideshow, GE and a former employee, Thomas Wilkins, have been fighting over ownership of two of the patents involved in the larger litigation.
The patent-at-issue in this case is U.S. Patent No. 6,921,985 (’985 Patent). The ’985 Patent is directed to a wind turbine that includes a blade pitch control system and a turbine controller coupled with the blade pitch control system. To increase the reliability of the turbine’s power supply, the turbine controller causes the blade pitch control system to vary pitch in response to transitions between different power sources.
After Wilkins brought a lawsuit to correct inventorship, Mitsubishi intervened in the suit. The case aroused Mitsubishi’s interest because the ’985 Patent is one of several asserted by GE against Mitsubishi in at least two lawsuits.
After the district court decided that Wilkins was not a co-inventor of the invention claimed in the ’985 Patent, Mitsubishi and Wilkins appealed.
In a recent decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court ruling.
To overcome the presumption that the named inventors on a patent are correct, an alleged co-inventor must prove his inventive contribution by clear and convincing evidence. The putative inventor can’t rely on his testimony alone. Rather, there must be evidence to corroborate his testimony.
The problem for Wilkins was that the district court found his testimony on inventorship not credible, and the proffered corroborating witness testimony fell short because the witnesses either relied on Wilkins or failed to provide ample basis for their opinions.
On appeal, Wilkins acknowledged his credibility problems but argued that the instances in which his credibility was impeached only extended to “immaterial and tangential points.” The appeals court disagreed:
Based on the trial record, we find no clear error in the district court’s assessment that the substance of Wilkins’s testimony, which addressed central issues such as conception and contribution, was inconsistent and purposefully evasive. We agree with the district court’s conclusion that Wilkins left his case with no credibility.
As it turned out, this wasn’t an issue of insufficient corroborating evidence of inventorship. Rather, as the court explained, the document Wilkins sent to GE’s German engineers, which he argued demonstrated his conception of the invention, did not disclose any elements of the claimed invention:
Notwithstanding that the record is devoid of proof that the German engineers relied on anything discussed in that document as part of their conception . . . our review of the record verifies that the document does not disclose any of the subject matter claimed in the ’985 patent.
In fact, the document in question “does not even depict the key feature Wilkins claims to have invented, i.e., a UPS powering the wind turbine’s three controllers.”
Therefore, there was no credible evidence of Wilkins’s conception: ”Wilkins provided no credible testimony for that document to corroborate” and “without credible testimony from Wilkins, there was nothing to corroborate.”
This chapter in the GE-Mitsubishi patent litigation appears to be closed.
