Ease, I wish you were right. You can go to any number of web sitres to find I was correct - "prior art trumps a patent regardless of prior court decisions".

Here's one:

http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/

While there are many different grounds on which a patent can be invalidated, the most common one is that the invention is found to be not novel or obvious in the light of the prior art. As the claims are used to define the scope of protection granted by a patent, this can only occur if the patent's claims are not novel or obvious. So, to get a patent invalidated, the first step is to locate documents that can be considered "prior art" against the patent's claims. Prior art basically means any disclosure of the contents of a claim, prior to the application for patent.

National patent laws provide various definitions of what constitutes prior art and in which situations. For example, not all countries recognize oral disclosures as prior art, and others provide grace periods during which the inventor may publish his invention without the publication counting as prior art against his later patent application. Additionally, the Paris Convention provides so-called priority rights, which give an inventor one year to file patent applications after he filed the first one, without endangering the novelty of his invention.