Jun
11
Quanta v. LG
Posted by Dirk Avery at 10:44 am under Patent, Supreme Court.
Patent exhaustion is alive and well, even for method patents. The key from the Supreme Court’s slip opinion:
Nothing in this Court’s approach to patent exhaustion supports LGE’s argument that method claims, as a category, are never exhaustible. A patented method may not be sold in the same way as an article or device, but methods nonetheless may be “embodied” in a product, the sale of which exhausts patent rights. The Court has repeatedly found method patents exhausted by the sale of an item embodying the method . . . . These cases rest on solid footing. Eliminating exhaustion for method patents would seriously undermine the exhaustion doctrine, since patentees seeking to avoid exhaustion could simply draft their claims to describe a method rather than an apparatus. On LGE’s theory here, for example, although Intel is authorized to sell a completed computer system that practices the LGE Patents, downstream purchasers could be liable for patent infringement, which would violate the longstanding principle that, when a patented item is “once lawfully made and sold, there is no restriction on [its] use to be implied for the [patentee’s] benefit.”
From Quanta v. LG syllabus (b), decided June 9, 2008 (citations omitted).
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That was very informative. Mentioned below is an excerpt of an article on patent exhaustion in India:
“A patent grants the Patent holder exclusive rights to prevent others from making, using, selling, offering for sale in the territory of patent grant or importing an invention into the territory of patent grant. Once an unrestricted sale of the patented invention is made, the rights of the patent holder with respect to the product are exhausted and this is called as the Doctrine of Exhaustion or First Sale Doctrine…..to read more please visit: http://indianipinfo.blogspot.com/2010/10/patent-exhaustion-in-india.html