Charles Goodyear was an American self-taught chemist and manufacturing engineer who developed vulcanized rubber, for which he received patent number 3633 from the United States Patent Office on June 15, 1844.
In United States patent law, patent misuse is a patent holder's use of a patent to restrain trade beyond enforcing the exclusive rights that a lawfully obtained patent provides. If a court finds that a patent holder committed patent misuse, the court may rule that the patent holder has lost the right to enforce the patent. Patent misuse that restrains economic competition substantially can also violate United States antitrust law.
The exhaustion doctrine, also referred to as the first sale doctrine, is a U.S. common law patent doctrine that limits the extent to which patent holders can control an individual article of a patented product after a so-called authorized sale. Under the doctrine, once an authorized sale of a patented article occurs, the patent holder's exclusive rights to control the use and sale of that article are said to be "exhausted," and the purchaser is free to use or resell that article without further restraint from patent law. However, under the repair and reconstruction doctrine, the patent owner retains the right to exclude purchasers of the articles from making the patented invention anew, unless it is specifically authorized by the patentee to do so.
Leverett Candee was an industrialist, businessman, and pioneer rubber manufacturer.
General Talking Pictures Corp. v. Western Electric Co., 304 U.S. 175 (1938), was a case that the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1938. The decision upheld so-called field-of-use limitations in patent licenses: it held that the limitations were enforceable in a patent infringement suit in federal court against the licensee and those acting in concert with it—for example, a customer that knowingly buys a patented product from the licensee that is outside the scope of the license.
Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., 976 F.2d 700, is a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in which the court appeared to overrule or drastically limit many years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent affirming the patent exhaustion doctrine, for example in Bauer & Cie. v. O'Donnell.
Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court reaffirmed the validity of the patent exhaustion doctrine, and in doing so made uncertain the continuing precedential value of a line of decisions in the Federal Circuit that had sought to limit Supreme Court exhaustion doctrine decisions to their facts and to require a so-called "rule of reason" analysis of all post-sale restrictions other than tie-ins and price fixes. In the course of restating the patent exhaustion doctrine, the Court held that the exhaustion doctrine is triggered by, among other things, an authorized sale of a component when the only reasonable and intended use of the component is to practice the patent and the component substantially embodies the patented invention by embodying its essential features. The Court also overturned, in passing, the part of decision below that held that the exhaustion doctrine was limited to product claims and did not apply to method claims.
A field-of-use limitation is a provision in a patent license that limits the scope of what the patent owner authorizes a manufacturing licensee to do in relation to the patent, by specifying a defined field of use—that is, a defined field of permissible operation by the licensee. In addition to affirmatively specifying the field of use, the license may negatively specify a field or fields, by specifying fields of use from which the licensee is excluded.
United States v. Univis Lens Co., 316 U.S. 241 (1942), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court explaining the exhaustion doctrine and applying it to find an antitrust violation because Univis's ownership of patents did not exclude its restrictive practices from the antitrust laws. The Univis case stands for the proposition that when an article sold by a patent holder or one whom it has authorized to sell it embodies the essential features of a patented invention, the effect of the sale is to terminate any right of the patent holder under patent law to control the purchaser's further disposition or use of the article itself and of articles into which it is incorporated as a component or precursor.
United States v. General Electric Co., 272 U.S. 476 (1926), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court holding that a patentee who has granted a single license to a competitor to manufacture the patented product may lawfully fix the price at which the licensee may sell the product.
A post-sale restraint, also termed a post-sale restriction, as those terms are used in United States patent law and antitrust law, is a limitation that operates after a sale of goods to a purchaser has occurred and purports to restrain, restrict, or limit the scope of the buyer's freedom to utilize, resell, or otherwise dispose of or take action regarding the sold goods. Such restraints have also been termed "equitable servitudes on chattels".
Adams v. Burke, 84 U.S. 453 (1873), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court first elaborated on the exhaustion doctrine. According to that doctrine, a so-called authorized sale of a patented product liberates the product from the patent monopoly. The product becomes the complete property of the purchaser and "passes without the monopoly." The property owner is then free to use or dispose of it as it may choose, free of any control by the patentee. Adams is a widely cited, leading case. A substantially identical doctrine applies in copyright law and is known as the "first sale doctrine".
Morton Salt Co. v. G.S. Suppiger Co., 314 U.S. 488 (1942), is a patent misuse decision of the United States Supreme Court. It was the first case in which the Court expressly labeled as "misuse" the Motion Picture Patent/Carbice tie-in defense to a charge of patent infringement and created the present blanket remedy in infringement cases of unenforceability of the misused patent. The decision re-emphasized that misuse can be found without finding an antitrust violation.
Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Mfg. Co., 243 U.S. 502 (1917), is United States Supreme Court decision that is notable as an early example of the patent misuse doctrine. It held that, because a patent grant is limited to the invention described in the claims of the patent, the patent law does not empower the patent owner, by notices attached to the patented article, to extend the scope of the patent monopoly by restricting the use of the patented article to materials necessary for their operation but forming no part of the patented invention, or to place downstream restrictions on the articles making them subject to conditions as to use. The decision overruled The Button-Fastener Case, and Henry v. A.B. Dick Co., which had held such restrictive notices effective and enforceable.
J. E. M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., 534 U.S. 124 (2001), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court holding for the first time that utility patents may be issued for crops and other flowering plants under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Supreme Court rejected the argument that the exclusive ways to protect these plants are under the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), 7 U.S.C. § 2321, and the Plant Patent Act of 1930 (PPA), 35 U.S.C. §§ 161-164.
JVC Kenwood Corp. v. Nero, Inc., 797 F.3d 1039, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 14402, is a 2015 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit concerning the rights of end users who purchase products subject to fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing under an industry-wide patent pool of standards-essential patents, and of suppliers of software to the end users. The Federal Circuit held that, where the patent holder had authorized sales to end users of optical discs compliant with the standard, which embodied the patents' essential features and were reasonably intended only to be used to practice the patents, the patent owner had no direct infringement claim against the end users without proof that the end-users were using unlicensed discs. The patent holder therefore had no claim for contributory infringement or induced infringement against a software company for selling software to the end users for use with the licensed discs. The decision is said to be an important one for clarifying the rights of downstream users and their suppliers in the context of patent pools and FRAND licensing.
Henry v. A.B. Dick Co., 224 U.S. 1 (1912), was a 1912 decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld patent licensing restrictions such as tie-ins on the basis of the so-called inherency doctrine—the theory that it was the inherent right of a patent owner, because he could lawfully refuse to license his patent at all, to exercise the "lesser" right to license it on any terms and conditions he chose. In 1917, the Supreme Court overruled the A.B. Dick case in Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Mfg. Co.,
The Button-Fastener Case, Heaton-Peninsular Button-Fastener Co. v. Eureka Specialty Co., also known as the Peninsular Button-Fastener Case, was for a time a highly influential decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Many courts of appeals, and the United States Supreme Court in the A.B. Dick case adopted its "inherency doctrine"—"the argument that, since the patentee may withhold his patent altogether from public use, he must logically and necessarily be permitted to impose any conditions which he chooses upon any use which he may allow of it." In 1917, however, the Supreme Court expressly overruled the Button-Fastener Case and the A.B. Dick case, in the Motion Picture Patents case.
Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., 581 U.S. ___ (2017), is a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on the exhaustion doctrine in patent law in which the Court held that after the sale of a patented item, the patent holder cannot sue for patent infringement relating to further use of that item, even when in violation of a contract with a customer or imported from outside the United States. The case concerned a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Lexmark against Impression Products, Inc., which bought used ink cartridges, refilled them, replaced a microchip on the cartridge to circumvent a digital rights management scheme, and then resold them. Lexmark argued that as they own several patents related to the ink cartridges, Impression Products was violating their patent rights. The U.S. Supreme Court, reversing a 2016 decision of the Federal Circuit, held that the exhaustion doctrine prevented Lexmark's patent infringement lawsuit, although Lexmark could enforce restrictions on use or resale of its contracts with direct purchasers under regular contract law. Besides printer and ink manufacturers, the decision of the case could affect the markets of high tech consumer goods and prescription drugs.
