to secure information for adjusting rates, was approved, and the commerce court decision in the matter overruled.
This is the first of the cases involving a dispute of jurisdiction between the commerce court and the commission.
Applications for writs, rehearings, and new trials are
often worth reporting at some length, as is shown in the
following story:
Declaring that the issues involved
in the case are of the "greatest public
importance," the department of justice
today joined in the application of
the losers in the so-called patent monopoly
case, asking a rehearing before
a full bench of the Supreme Court.
The case was recently decided four to
three in favor of the contention that
the patentee's control of his product
is absolute.
The government's application signed by Attorney-General Wickersham and Solicitor-General Lehmann vigorously declares that the court's decision sustaining the right of a patentee to attach to the sale of an invention, restrictions stipulating that the purchaser must use only such supplies which are not patented as are bought from the patentee of the invention, seriously concerns the United States in a number of civil and criminal cases now pending under the Sherman law.
The decision, the government submits, "extends the power of property held under letters patent beyond the warrant of the constitution and the grant of the patent laws, and publishes it above authority of Congress to regulate commerce among the several states, and above the universal limitation expressed in the maxim 'So use your own as not to injure another's.'"
