You May Be Exhausted Over Standard Essential Patents (And Not Even Know It)
In interpreting a patent license agreement originally drafted in the era of third generation (3G) cellular networks, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that the license agreement covered subsequent wireless...more
Broad Claim Language and Unpredictability in the Art Lead to Non-Enablement - In Enzo Life Sciences, Inc. v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., Appeal Nos. 2017-2498, -2499, -2545, -2546, broad patent claims were invalid as...more
• In a relatively rare opinion regarding design patents, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit weighed in recently on the requirements for design patents in its Automotive Body Parts Association v. Ford Global...more
PATENT CASE OF THE WEEK - Automotive Body Parts Ass’n. v. Ford Global Techs., LLC, Appeal No. 2018-1613 (Fed. Cir. July 23, 2019) - Our case of the week is a design patent case. It concerns two primary issues—what...more
On July 23, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit released its decision affirming summary judgment that the asserted design patents were not invalid for non-ornamentality under 35 U.S.C. § 171, and rejecting...more
The Federal Circuit has ruled that neither the exhaustion nor permissible repair doctrines allow manufacture of new replacement components covered by design patents. The Automotive Body Parts Association (ABPA) sued Ford...more
The Federal Circuit issued a precedential opinion on July 23, 2019, affirming the validity of two design patents related to the Ford F-150 hood and headlamp and sweepingly rejecting arguments that the patents on automotive...more
AUTOMOTIVE BODY PARTS ASS'N v. FORD GLOBAL TECHNOLOGIES, LLC - Before Hughes, Schall, and Stoll. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Summary: Aesthetic appeal is not an...more
A district court in the Western District of Washington denied Adaptics Ltd.’s (“Adaptics”) motion for summary judgment of patent exhaustion, which was based on a theory that an authorized sale by a downstream reseller can...more
As we previously reported, Sanofi-Aventis sued Merck Sharp & Dohme in the District of Delaware for patent infringement based on Merck’s proposed follow-on biologics of Sanofi-Aventis’s Lantus® and Lantus® SoloSTAR® ([rDNA...more
In an application of 2017 U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Impressions Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Intern., Inc., the Northern District California in International Fruit Genetics LLC v. Orcharddepot.com, No. 4:17-cv-02905-JSW,...more
Arbitration - Waymo v. Uber Technologies, 870 F.3d 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2017) - Waymo sued Uber and others for trade secret misappropriation and patent infringement. Uber contends that Waymo should be compelled to...more
Patent Exhaustion: Supreme Court Expands Patent-Limiting Doctrine - The U.S. Supreme Court at the end of the past term handed down a decision, Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., that greatly expanded...more
The U.S. Supreme Court at the end of the past term handed down a decision, Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., that greatly expanded the doctrine of patent exhaustion. This equitable doctrine prevents a...more
Generally, a patent owner's rights are exhausted after an authorized sale; the patent owner cannot sue a downstream customer who purchased an authorized patented product from a third party reseller. So how can a patent owner...more
I was on a panel at the Patent Law in Global Perspectives Seminar on October 20 at Stanford Law School, discussing the implications of Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark, 581 U.S. ___, 137 S. Ct. 1523 (2017), for patent...more
On May 30th, the Supreme Court ruled in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc. that all patent rights are automatically exhausted upon the sale of a product irrespective of contract stipulations and...more
The most important patent-antitrust case in recent years is not an antitrust case but is the United States Supreme Court’s May 2017 decision in Impression Products Inc. v. Lexmark Int’l., Inc., 583 U.S. ___ (2017). ...more
Last May, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a highly-anticipated decision in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int’l, Inc., reversing the Federal Circuit and holding that, when a patent holder sells a product, it exhausts all...more
Patent owners have long imposed post-sale restrictions on their patented goods and relied on U.S. patent laws to enforce these restrictions. For instance, companies have sought to enforce “single use” restrictions on their...more
The US Patent Act gives patent holders the right to prevent others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention in the United States or importing the invention into the United States. The premise behind...more
Supreme Court Hits Reset on Patent Venue Law in TC Heartland - In the recent TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC decision, the Supreme Court reversed nearly thirty years of patent venue law and held that a...more
The Court also holds that patent exhaustion applies to both foreign and domestic sales in a historic decision. Key Points: ..Patent rights are exhausted by sale even if the patentee purports to impose post-sale...more
In 1628, Lord Coke in his “Institutes of the laws of England” summarized the common law on restraints on the alienation of chattels stating that any attempt by a seller to restrict resale or use of the chattel after selling...more