My experience has been that no patent is actually "original". It seems like anyone can patent anything and get a lawsuit stirred up, as long as the process is valuable enough.
Patents are not supposed to be granted for something that is "obvious to someone trained in the art". But I work in the GPS applications business, and hundreds of patents were granted to things you can do outdoors, but suddenly adding a GPS to a thing known about for years is patentable. That's BS.
One company I know got a patent on spreading different amounts of fertilizer on farm fields based on GPS and a map. Of course a farmer could have done that manually, but add a GPS, boom, patent. As far as I'm concerned, it would be obvious to any farmer who spread fertilizer based on a map that he could use a GPS to do it.
What's worse, the company that did that original patent about 20 years ago got a "new" patent about 5 years ago that as far as I can tell does exactly the same thing. No difference. They just drastically re-worded the patent application. They even referenced the original patent, but no one was sharp enough to tell that they were describing the same thing.
Cargill or ADM, perchance?