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Four years after fully embracing international copyright exhaustion in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court has finally taken up the issue of patent exhaustion. In Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International Inc., the Court has been asked to answer two questions:

  • Whether a sale that transfers title to the patented item while specifying post-sale restrictions on the article’s use or resale avoids application of the patent exhaustion doctrine and therefore permits the enforcement of such post-sale restrictions through the patent law’s infringement remedy.
  • Whether, in light of [the] Court’s holding in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 1351, 1363 (2013), that the common law doctrine barring restraints on alienation that is the basis of exhaustion doctrine “makes no geographical distinctions,” a sale of a patented article—authorized by the U.S. patentee—that takes place outside of the United States exhausts the U.S. patent rights in that article.
  • This post looks at the second of these questions.