Syllabus.

If the proceedings in the Court of Oyer and Terminer could not, under the laws of New Jersey, be reviewed in a higher court of that State, except upon the allowance of a writ of error by such court or by some judge, and if such allowance was refused, then the judgment of the court of original jurisdiction was, within the meaning of the acts of Congress, the judgment of the highest court of the State in which a determination of the case could be had, and such judgment could have been, upon writ of error, reëxamined here, if it had denied any right, privilege, or immunity specially set up and claimed under the Constitution of the United States. Gregory v. McVeigh, 23 Wall. 294, 306; Fisher v. Perkins, 122 U. S. 522, 526.

If an indictment in a state court, under statutes not void under the Constitution of the United States be defective, according to the essential principles of criminal procedure, an error in rendering judgment upon it - even if the accused at the trial objected to it as insufficient - should not be made the basis of jurisdiction in a court of the United States to issue a writ of habeas corpus. The court below having had jurisdiction of the offence and of the accused, and having proceeded under a statute not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, the Circuit Court of the United States had no authority to interfere, by means of a writ of habeas corpus, with the execution of the sentence. Andrews v. Swartz, 156 U. S. 272; New York v. Eno, 155 U. S. 89, 98.

The judgment is

Affirmed.

KEELER v. STANDARD FOLDING BED COMPANY.

APPEAL FROM THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS.

No. 52. Submitted March 20, 1894. Decided April S, 1995.

One who buys patented articles of manufacture from one authorized to sell them at the place where they are sold becomes possessed of an absolute property in such articles, unrestricted in time or place.

Argument for Appellees.

Whether a patentee may protect himself and his assignees by special contracts brought home to the purchasers is not a question before the court and upon which it expresses no opinion.

The complainants were assignees, for the State of Massachusetts, of certain letters patent granted to one Welch, for an improvement in wardrobe bedsteads. The Welch Folding Bed Company owned the patent rights for the State of Michigan. The defendants purchased a carload of said beds from the Welch Folding Bed Company, at Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the purpose of selling them in Massachusetts, and afterwards sold them there and were still engaged in selling such beds in Boston. Held, that the defendants having purchased the patented articles in Michigan from the assignee of the patent for the territory included in that State, had a right to sell them anywhere within the United States, including Massachusetts, where the patent rights had been assigned to another assignee.

The previous cases bearing on this point considered and reviewed.

THE Standard Folding Bed Company, a corporation of the State of New York, filed in the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts a bill of complaint against Keeler & Brother, partners doing business in the city of Boston.

By an agreed state of facts it appears that the complainants are assignees, for the State of Massachusetts, of certain letters patent granted to one Lyman Welch, for an improvement in wardrobe bedsteads; that the Welch Folding Bed Company own the patent rights for the State of Michigan, and that the defendants purchased a carload of said beds from the Welch Folding Bed Company, at Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the purpose of selling them in Massachusetts, and that they afterwards sold and are now engaged in selling the said beds in Boston.

The conclusion in the court below was that the defendants were not protected from the claim of the Massachusetts assignee by having purchased the patented articles from the Michigan assignee, and accordingly there was an injunction and final decree in favor of the complainants, from which an appeal was taken to this court.

Mr. Causten Browne and Mr. J. Henry Taylor for appellants.

Opinion of the Court.

Mr. Edwin T. Rice for appellees.

MR. JUSTICE SHIRAS, after stating the case, delivered the opinion of the court.

It is provided in section 4884 of the Revised Statutes that every patent shall contain a grant to the patentee, his heirs, or assigns, for the term of seventeen years, of the exclusive right to make, use, and vend the invention or discovery throughout the United States and Territories thereof;" and in section 4898 that "every patent or any interest therein shall be assignable in law by an instrument in writing, and the patentee or his assigns or legal representatives may in like manner grant and convey an exclusive right under his patent to the whole or any specified part of the United States."

Where the patentee has not parted, by assignment, with any of his original rights, but chooses himself to make and vend a patented article of manufacture, it is obvious that a purchaser can use the article in any part of the United States, and, unless restrained by contract with the patentee, can sell or dispose of the same. It has passed outside of the monopoly, and is no longer under the peculiar protection granted to patented rights. As was said by Mr. Justice Clifford, in Goodyear v. Beverly Rubber Co. (1 Cliff. 348, 354): "Having manufactured the material and sold it for a satisfactory compensation, whether as material or in the form of a manufactured article, the patentee, so far as that quantity of the product of his invention is concerned, has enjoyed all the rights secured to him by his letters patent, and the manufactured article, and the material of which it is composed, go to the purchaser for a valuable consideration, discharged of all the rights of the patentee previously attached to it, or impressed upon it, by the act of Congress under which the patent was granted."

Suppose, however, the patentee has exercised his statutory right of assigning by conveying to another an exclusive right under the patent to a specified part of the United States,

Opinion of the Court.

what are the rights of a purchaser of patented articles from the patentee himself within the territory reserved to him? Does he thereby obtain an absolute property in the article, so that he can use and vend it in all parts of the United States, or, if he take the article into the assigned territory, must he again pay for the privilege of using and selling it? If, as is often the case, the patentee has divided the territory of the United States into twenty or more "specified parts," must a person who has bought and paid for the patented article in one part, from a vendor having an exclusive right to make and vend therein, on removing from one part of the country to another, pay to the local assignee for the privilege of using and selling his property, or else be subjected to an action for damages as a wrongdoer? And is there any solid distinction. to be made, in such a case, between the right to use and the right to sell? Can the owner of the patented article hold and deal with it the same as in case of any other description of property belonging to him, and, on his death, does it pass, with the rest of his personal estate, to his legal representatives, and thus, as a part of the assets to be administered, become liable to be sold?

These are questions which, although already in effect answered by this cout in more cases than one, are now to be considered in the state of facts disclosed in this record.

In Wilson v. Rousseau, 4 How. 646, 688, and in Bloomer v. McQuewan, 14 How. 539, it was held that the purchasers of patented machines had the right to continue the use of such machines, without again paying royalty, although the patent was twice extended. In the latter case it appeared that McQuewan, the defendant, had purchased his machines, not from the original patentee or from a territorial assignee, but from a purchaser from the latter. Therefore that case is authority for the proposition that the purchaser of a patented machine has not only the right to continue the use of the machine as long as it exists, but to sell such machine, and that his vendee takes the right to use.

The scope and effect of those decisions were thus expressed by Mr. Justice Clifford, in Mitchell v. Hawley, 16 Wall. 544,

Opinion of the Court.

546, 547: "Patentees acquire by their letters patent the exclusive right to make and use their patented inventions and to vend to others to be used for the period of time specified in the patent, but when they have made one or more of the things patented, and have vended the same to others to be used, they have parted to that extent with their exclusive right, as they are never entitled to but one royalty for a patented machine, and consequently a patentee, when he has himself constructed a machine and sold it without any conditions, or authorized another to construct, sell, and deliver it, or to construct, use, and operate it, without any conditions, and the consideration has been paid to him for the thing patented, the rule is well established that the patentee must be understood to have parted to that extent with all his exclusive right, and that he ceases to have any interest whatever in the patented machine so sold and delivered or authorized to be constructed and operated. Where such circumstances appear, the owner of the machine, whether he built it or purchased it, if he has also acquired the right to use and operate it during the lifetime of the patent, may continue to use it until it is worn out, in spite of any and every extension subsequently obtained by the patentee or his assigns."

These cases were followed, and a step further taken, in the case of Adams v. Burke, 17 Wall. 453, 456. There Lockhart and Seelye owned, by assignment, all the right, title, and interest which patentees had in a certain patented coffin lid, in a circular district of a diameter of ten miles, whereof the city of Boston was the centre. Adams, also by assignment, was the owner of all other rights under the patent. Burke, an undertaker, carried on his business at Natick, and within the territory covered by the patent as owned by Adams. To a bill for an infringement, filed by Adams in the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts, Burke pleaded that the patent coffins used by him in his business were purchased by him from Lockhart and Seelye, and were sold to him without condition or restriction.

The validity of his plea was sustained by the Circuit Court, and its decree dismissing the bill was affirmed by this court.