Henry Billings Brown

“ The fact that the rules of the patent office require that the original patent should be placed in its custody for the purpose of surrendering it upon the issue of an amended patent gives that department no right to the possession of it upon the rejection of the application for a reissue. If the patentee abandoned his application for a reissue, he is entitled to a return of his original patent precisely as it stood when such application was made, and the patent office has no greater authority to mutilate it by rejecting any of its claims than it has to cancel the entire patent. ”

“ The only authority competent to set a patent aside, or to annul it, or to correct it for any reason whatever, is vested in the courts of the United States, and not in the department which issued the patent. ”

“ New matter cannot be introduced nor can the scope of the invention be enlarged. All that the applicant can do is to so amend his patent as to enable him to receive some practical and beneficial result from his actual invention, of which he has been deprived by defects or omissions in the original patent. The object of a patentee applying for a reissue is not to reopen the question of the validity of the original patent, but to rectify any error which may have been found to have arisen from his inadvertence or mistake. ”