Within the last month, California has made significant strides toward its bid to create a circular economy for certain packaging and food service ware materials. On January 8, 2024, California's Department of Resources...more
In a statement released on May 3, 2023, the Dutch Association of Investors for Sustainable Development (VBDO) called for companies in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and grocery retail sectors to reduce their...more
The Southern District of New York has held, in Ratermann v. Pierre Fabre USA, Inc., that the Communications Decency Act’s (CDA) exception for intellectual property claims does not apply to claims asserted under New York Civil...more
The CJEU in its Tom Kabinet judgment has ruled that the supply of e-books qualifies as “an act of communication to the public” under the InfoSoc Directive instead of “a distribution to the public” as is the case with physical...more
Paid Family Leave - A bill to require paid family leave, H.107, was left on the legislative calendar upon adjournment last May, a result of a stalemate between House and Senate leadership....more
Will Single-Use Products and Packaging Be a Thing of the Past in California? - Walk down virtually any street, sidewalk, path, beach or trail in California and you will invariably find at least some single-use product or...more
..What do boards need to know about sustainability ratings? Silda Wall Spitzer and John Mandyck discuss in the Harvard Business Review. ..Growing its education investments, Omidyar Network expanded its educational agenda to...more
Grocery shoppers used to make the final decision of their supermarket trip in the checkout line. Reaching for boxes of cereal, cartons of eggs, and jars of jam in their rolling metal carts, placing those items onto...more
Welcome to our Environmental Legislative Updates. Throughout Connecticut’s legislative session, these updates highlight developments concerning environmental law and policy. ...more
The Situation: Current EU legislation does not address management of single use plastic products. The Result: Following its previous example of light-weight plastic carrier bags, the European Commission therefore proposes...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
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
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
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
In both the U.S. and the EU, it is generally acknowledged that the enforcement and commercialization of IP rights must comply with the applicable antitrust laws. This is particularly true for IP licensing. While the majority...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
On May 30, 2017, in Impression Products, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a patent owner’s sale of an item, either within or outside the United States, exhausts all of the patent owner’s patent rights in that item,...more
Hailed by some as the “right to repair”, on May 30, 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that a seller’s patent rights are not valid beyond the first sale of the patented product. Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Intern., Inc....more
Patent owners can no longer restrict the use of their patented products after the products are sold. Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, a patent owner’s rights are “exhausted” once the patent owner sells the product. ...more
In a case of keen importance to sellers of refurbished products such as auto parts and medical devices, last month, in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., ___ U.S. ___ (2017), the Supreme Court of the...more
In a nearly unanimous opinion issued recently, the U.S. Supreme Court held “a patentee’s decision to sell a product exhausts all of its patent rights in that item, regardless of any restrictions the patentee purports to...more
On May 30, 2017, in Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court held that a domestic or foreign sale of a patented product exhausts all U.S. patent rights in that product. The case was...more