Opinion of the Court.

in the first degree, and what murder of the second, created no new crimes, but merely made a distinction with a view to a difference in the punishment between the most heinous and the less aggravated grades of the crime of murder, said: "When the legislature, commendably simplifying the form of the indictment, provided that in charging the crime it should not be necessary to set forth the manner in which or the means whereby the death was caused, but that it should be sufficient to charge that the defendant wilfully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought, killed and murdered the deceased, it merely provided that in a charge of murder, a crime well understood and defined in the law, it should be enough to charge the crime in language sufficient to designate it. According as he shall or shall not be proved to have committed the crime of murder, he shall be convicted or acquitted; and if convicted, according as it shall be proved that he committed it under the circumstances which characterize the one degree or the other, so it will be found or adjudged with a view to his punishment, and he will be punished accordingly. No right of the defendant was violated, nor any privilege of his disregarded or contravened by convicting him of murder of the first degree on an indictment which described the crime according to the statutory form." Substantially the same views were expressed by this court in respect of a similar statute in force in the Territory of Utah. Davis v. Utah Territory, 151 U. S. 262, 266, et seq.

In view of these decisions, declaring the meaning and scope of the statutes under which the accused was prosecuted, it cannot be held that he was proceeded against under an indictment based upon statutes denying to him the equal protection of the laws, or that were inconsistent with due process of law, as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

It is equally clear that the refusal of the courts of New Jersey to grant the accused a writ of error or to stay the execution of the sentence passed upon him constituted no reason for interference in his behalf by a writ of habeas corpus issued by a court of the United States.

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 8, 1895.

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 appel

lants.

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 66 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 court 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,