A federal judge has decided against invalidating a cherry patent owned by the Canadian government, reversing a previous legal victory won by three Washington farms.

Three years ago, Chief U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian in Spokane, Wash., ruled the Canadian agriculture ministry’s patent on Staccato cherry trees was void due to evidence it commercially sold the variety more than a year before seeking intellectual property protections.

However, the judge has now overturned that decision because it was based on “clear error” in light of new evidence.

The earlier ruling relied on a spreadsheet submitted by the three Washington farms accused of patent infringement, which purported to show Staccato was sold commercially a couple years before Canada filed its patent petition.

However, an unaltered version of that spreadsheet now indicates the commercial sales were actually of another cherry cultivar, not Staccato — creating “genuine issues of material facts” and undermining the earlier findings, he said.

The defendants “falsely represented” the earlier spreadsheet as an original document, even though information referring to another cherry variety had been omitted from it, the judge said.

“It would be manifestly unjust to excuse this behavior at this stage of the proceedings,” Bastian said.

The Canadian agriculture ministry initially filed the lawsuit about five years ago against Van Well Nursery, Monson Fruit and Gordon and Sally Goodwin, all of whom produce cherry trees or fruit near Wenatchee, Wash.

The complaint alleges the defendants have wrongly commercialized an allegedly new cherry cultivar, Glory, that’s actually the Canadian government’s patented Staccato variety.

Last year, the judge determined that Glory and Staccato trees are identical, rejecting the defendants’ arguments that they are two separate cultivars.

The Glory variety that cherry farmer Gordon Goodwin thought he’d discovered in his orchard was actually a Staccato tree, which had mistakenly been delivered to his property among a shipment of trees of another variety, the judge said.

The Canadian government claims that Van Well Nursery was only allowed to evaluate Staccato trees, but instead sold one to Goodwin, who then provided the cultivar to Monson Fruit, which propagated and planted it.

Gordon and the other defendants argued that Glory was a natural mutation whose cherries matured later in the season, offering an advantage in the market.

But the judge has ruled that any disparities in the DNA between Glory and Staccato are “not meaningful differences or representative of differences in cherry varieties, but instead represent error or natural genetic variation in individual trees.”

The judge hasn’t yet decided how that conclusion affects the Canadian government’s false advertising and patent infringement claims, which continue to be subject to litigation.