## Facts

- Lorenz filed a patent application in 1920 for a process to manufacture soap and recover glycerine.
- After filing, Lorenz disclosed the substance of his application to Ittner, Colgate’s chief chemist, to allow Colgate to exploit the process; Ittner expressed disinterest.
- Lorenz’s 1920 application was rejected and its prosecution was abandoned.
- Ittner later filed his own application (1931) and obtained a patent in 1933 on a similar process.
- After learning of Ittner’s patent, Lorenz attempted to revive his 1920 application but was denied.
- In 1934, Lorenz filed a new application adopting nineteen claims copied verbatim from Ittner’s patent, asserting Ittner’s claimed subject matter had been disclosed by Lorenz in 1920.
- The Patent Office declared an interference; in subsequent litigation under R.S. § 4918, the Third Circuit (in an earlier appeal) determined Lorenz was the first inventor and Ittner’s patent could not stand.
- On remand, the district court held Lorenz’s patent invalid because Colgate had publicly used the process more than two years before Lorenz’s 1934 filing; it also denied Colgate relief under Ittner’s patent based on the prior inventorship ruling.
- Both parties appealed: Lorenz challenged the public-use invalidity holding; Colgate sought to sustain or revive Ittner’s patent.

## Issues

1. Whether Lorenz’s patent was invalid under the statutory public-use bar because Colgate publicly used the process more than two years before Lorenz’s 1934 application, even if Colgate’s use derived from Ittner’s appropriation of Lorenz’s earlier disclosure.
2. Whether Colgate could enforce Ittner’s patent after a prior appellate determination that Lorenz, not Ittner, was the true inventor.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit affirmed the judgment holding Lorenz’s patent invalid under the public-use bar based on Colgate’s public use more than two years before Lorenz’s 1934 filing.
- The court held the public-use statute contains no exception where the public use is the result of misappropriation or “piracy.”
- The Third Circuit affirmed denial of Colgate’s effort to rely on Ittner’s patent because Ittner had already been determined not to be the inventor.
- As a practical result, neither party retained a valid patent on the process.

## Legal Principles

- A patent is barred when the invention was in public use in the United States for more than the statutory period before the patentee’s application; the statutory bar applies categorically.
- The public-use bar does not include an implied exception for public use stemming from another’s wrongful derivation of the invention from the inventor.
- An inventor who abandons an earlier application and later files anew may be subject to intervening statutory bars measured from the later filing date.
- A patent cannot be sustained in favor of a party when the named patentee is not the true inventor; priority determinations in interference-type litigation preclude enforcement by the non-inventor.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that Lorenz’s later-filed patent was void because Colgate’s public use began more than two years before Lorenz’s 1934 application, and it declined to create a misappropriation-based exception to the statutory bar; it also refused to allow Colgate to enforce Ittner’s patent after prior findings that Ittner was not the inventor, leaving the process unpatented.


Lorenz v. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co., 167 F.2d 423 (3d Cir. 1948)