I'm certainly not a patent expert...
...but I believe that the question here is the difference between "patent infringement" and "prior art". If Person A patents something and then Person B goes ahead and use the covered claims without authorization, Person A has the right to claim that Person B illegally infringed on his intellectual property. As far as I know, that is not the case here.
The "prior art" doctrine, however, says that for something to be patentable in the first place, it must be new and not obvious. As such, when a patent is filed, the inventor submits to the Patent Office (which theoretically checks) information about similar pre-existing things. This applies whether or not they were patented, or even used.
In this particular case, TSC was in business with an electronic commerce system a number of years before the E-Data patent was filed. For whatever reason, it was not mentioned as 'prior art' in the Freeney filing, the Patent Office didn't pick it up on their own, and nobody remembered it (in this context) until recently.
Thus, the applicable theory here is that if some or all of the claims in the E-Data patent were for things that already existed (whether or not Mr. Freeney was aware of them) they are, by definition, not patentable in the first place, and therefore those claims are invalid. Other claims, however, might still be valid because there was no 'prior art' related to them. Ultimately, the question of how many of the claims are valid bears on the issue of how broadly the rights are that the patent holder can claim, and thus the economic value of the patent.
All that said, I'll point out that I have no special knowledge or axe to grind here, and I assume that eventually the courts will decide all the various issues at stake here.
-David S. Rose |
