Aetna Steel Products Corporation v. Southwest Products Company, a Corporation

This is an appeal from a judgment and decree of the District Court for the Southern District of California, Central Division. The cause of action is one for alleged infringement of Potter patents numbered 2,626,841 and 2,724,172 for a bearing and its method of manufacture. Plaintiff-appellee, hereafter referred to as plaintiff or plaintiff-appellee, is a California corporation and owns the patents. Defendant-appellant, hereafter referred to as defendant as well as defendant-appellant, is a New York corporation and owns and operates Kahr Bearing (as a division) in Burbank, California. Jurisdiction of the trial court was under 28 U.S.C. § 1338 , and the Patent Laws, Title 35 U.S.C. Jurisdiction to review the judgment and decree is conferred by 28 U.S.C. §§ 1291 and 1292 (4).

The bearings involved are known as self-aligning bearings and consist of a ball (truncated and containing a bore) and an outer race in which the ball element is rotatably held. Self-aligning bearings have great importance where it is difficult to obtain exact parallelism between a shaft and its housing bore axis, or where the housing may be deflected under load or while in use. These bearings, both those of the…