05.30.17
Gemini version available ♊︎Another Amazing Bit of News About Patents: Supreme Court Knocks Out Lexmark a Week After TC Heartland
The Supremes acknowledge that the culture of patent maximalism needs to be curbed
Summary: Justices of the US Supreme Court have just ruled (yet again) against a culture that created a patent bubble which in no way benefits producing companies (TC Heartland case) or their clients (Lexmark case)
BIG changes are afoot at the US patent system, so it’s certainly not a good time to be away. 3 years after Alice we now have TC Heartland. We called it the news of the year (so far in the patent domain).
Outside the realm of software, in which most patent lawsuits are filed by trolls, there is now a decision on the Lexmark case.
“And AGAIN #SCOTUS tells #CAFC that their patent-friendly decisions are wrong,” Jan Wildeboer from Red Hat wrote. “Will they learn? No.”
Well, we have been writing about it for about a year. To be fair to CAFC, ever since the likes of Randall Rader left there have been some improvements in its approach.
Kit Walsh from the EFF, having written about this case for a while, had this to say some hours ago:
The Supreme Court struck a blow today [PDF] for your right to own the things you buy, reversing a lower court decision that had given patent owners the power to sue customers who paid in full for a patented item but then used it in a way the patent owner didn’t care for. The Court’s reasoning will help us protect your rights from overbroad copyright and other restrictions, like the ones written into “end user license agreements” for software or imposed by technological restrictions given legal teeth by Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Lexmark tried every legal trick in the book to keep you from refilling your own printer cartridges, and had finally found a sympathetic ear at the Federal Circuit, the Federal Court of Appeals with jurisdiction over patent law. The Federal Circuit agreed with Lexmark that a patent owner could write their own rules that customers would have to follow or face liability for patent infringement. Even someone who later acquired a product, like the companies that refill printer cartridges, would have to abide by these restrictions.
Cory Doctorow, who is affiliated with the EFF, then elaborated as follows:
Lexmark has spent nearly 20 years fighting the war on carbon, trying to stop you from refilling your laser printer cartridges. In 2003, they attempted to use the DMCA and DRM to argue that it was an act of piracy (the courts didn’t buy it) and then in 2015, they went all the way to the Supreme Court with the idea that you were violating their patent license terms if you treated the cartridges you purchased as though you owned them.
Today, the Supreme Court told Lexmark it was wrong. Again. Saying that when a patent holder “chooses to sell an item, that product is no longer within the limits of the monopoly and instead becomes the private individual property of the purchaser, with the rights and benefits that come along with ownership.”
Lexmark was trying to use patents to get something that DRM didn’t get them back in the naughties, but they might well take another run at it. Back then, the company lost in part because the very simple software in its printer cartridges (a 12-byte program!) didn’t rise to the level of a copyrightable work. Today, a cartridge might have tens of thousands of lines of code in it — and thanks to dreadful laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA, all Lexmark would have to do is design their cartridges so that refilling them required breaking some kind of DRM, and they’d be able to threaten their competitors with $500,000 fines and 5 year prison sentences (for a first offense) if they helped you refill your cartridge.
We expect these SCOTUS cases (this and TC Heartland) to be discussed for a long time to come, not just in legal blogs but also the corporate media. What’s more important than press coverage (or spin that we expect from the patent law firms) is the decision itself. It cannot be overturned. █
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