Supreme Court to Consider Patent Exhaustion

My guess would be that they will once again reverse the Federal circuit court that does patents, as they have done so repeatedly in the past few months. If they were not likely to overrule, I would think that they would not have elected to review this.

The case is straightforward, LG has patents on chip designs, which it licensed to Intel. Intel has sold these chips to a number of Taiwanese manufacturers, and then LG sued these computer manufacturers for patent infringement.

The Federal Circuit Court allowed the suit to proceed, and the Taiwanese manufacturers claim that:

Lawyers for the Taiwanese companies, meanwhile, responded in court filings that once Intel sold the chips, LG's patent had run its course under the legal doctrine of "patent exhaustion." As a result, LG cannot enforce the patent against downstream purchasers, Quanta and the others said.

My view: The patent court went overboard again.

Patent exhaustion has been the law of the land, and for that matter the world, for years, and the consequence of its reversal would be catastrophic.

Our IP system is well and truly broken.