Arco Industries Corporation v. Chemcast Corporation, C. J. Edwards and Phillip L. Rubright, Defendants

ENGEL, Circuit Judge.

We speak in this patent infringement and unfair competition appeal of grommets. To the uninitiated, “grommet” may evoke the noise made by a frog, or perhaps a small Tolkienesque character. These particular grommets, however, are objects inserted at the points in an automobile where a wire or cable must pass through a hole in a panel, such as the shield between a car’s interior and the engine area. Usually made of a resilient elastomeric material, grommets surround and seal both the cable passing through the hole and the aperture itself. The seal provided by the grommet…