“The long-awaited Supreme Court ruling in Impression Products v. Lexmark International has just been handed down. It deals with two questions related to patent exhaustion, and I was aware of it before but wanted to wait until the implications of that dispute on the smartphone cases I’m primarily interested in would be clearer,” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “The good news is that the Supreme Court has once again overruled the Federal Circuit in a way that strengthens those defending themselves against attempts to gain excessive leverage and extract overcompensation from patents. The Supreme Court is staying its course with respect to patent matters, regardless of some patent troll lobbying groups suggesting that all those decisions would result in the demise of the American inventor (quite the opposite is the case).”
“No overcompensation. No overleveraging. No double-dipping. No restrictions that go beyond what the Patent Act allows. That’s the message here,” Mueller writes. “Presumably, some people in another Washington DC building are now reading the Supreme Court decision: the lawyers working on the FTC’s case against Qualcomm.”
“Patent exhaustion as a concept has been strengthened today, and its profile in certain other cases will likely be even higher now,” Mueller writes. “While Apple takes certain positions when it enforces its own patents (and would rather avoid Supreme Court review of a highly controversial Federal Circuit decision in its favor), exhaustion is not an issue in Apple v. Samsung but it does play a role in Apple v. Qualcomm: Count XXIII of Apple’s antitrust complaint against Qualcomm is a request for judicial “declaration of unenforceability [of Qualcomm’s patents in certain contexts] due to exhaustion.””
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: More good news for Apple!
Qualcomm’s FRAND abuse must not stand. Qualcomm’s licensing scam — charging a percentage of the total cost of all components in the phone, even non-Qualcomm components — is unreasonable, illogical, and irrational.
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