It is not intuitive that an offer to manufacture a product made by a patent owner’s own supplier could be a commercial offer for sale that would start the clock ticking on the one-year deadline for filing a patent application on an invention embodied in the product. Yet, this was precisely the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s conclusion in Hamilton Beach Brands v. Sunbeam Products, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 16797 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 14, 2013).
Hamilton Beach Brands Inc. has successfully marketed its Stay or Go slow cooker, increasing its market share by 30 percent. The company’s success was met by its competitor Sunbeam Products Inc.’s introduction of a competing product, the Cook & Carry. The Stay or Go is the commercial embodiment of the invention claimed in Hamilton Beach’s U.S. Patent 7,485,831 (the ’831 patent), which was pending at the time of the introduction of Sunbeam’s Cook & Carry slow cooker. The description in Hamilton Beach’s pending patent application also covered Sunbeam’s Cook & Carry product so Hamilton Beach filed a continuation of its application covering its competitor’s product. When the resulting U.S. Patent 7,947,928 (the ’928 patent) duly issued, Hamilton Beach brought a patent infringement suit against Sunbeam in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
