[pbhjpbhj]

It sounds like you didn't have very good counsel if the court didn't consider clear prior disclosure as demonstrating invalidity.

FWIW in the UK we have expert patent court judges; USA used to have that too, I gather.

>I doubt it was non-obvious to one skilled in the art //

You have to be careful here, "obvious" doesn't quite mean the same as in daily life. It's so easy to see a neat solution to a problem and go "that's so simple, anyone could have done it". Once you've seen things they often seem simple (ex post facto analysis).

I think this is particularly true in some arts where basically every day any ordinary worker invents solutions to problems.

[excessive]

The plaintiffs certainly had a larger legal team. We brought our patent attorney and a trial lawyer on our own dime, and we managed to get some time from the chief patent counsel for a very large company because he had a relationship with one of our investors.

The plaintiffs managed to get jurisdiction in their own city (across the country from ours), and the general belief was that the judge granted this because he wanted a change from the drug trials he normally dealt with. This made it very expensive for us, and they definitely had the home court advantage.

I could whine about a lot of other things. For instance the plaintiffs removed every juror candidate who had any college, leaving only locals who I don't think even understood trigonometry. The fact that you're not supposed to be able to patent math, but somehow math on a computer gets through the patent process, etc...

> ex post facto analysis

I'm not sure what definition of "obvious" survives then. I was out of college for less than 2 months, and I wrote the code in a single evening. The "infringing" algorithm was less than 10 lines.