Patent owners have the right to prevent their goods, first sold overseas, from being refurbished and resold in the US, an appeals court ruled on Friday.
Ruling in a dispute brought by Lexmark International Inc over refurbished printer cartridges, the court said patent law enables limits to be placed on the resale of products that are first sold overseas.
Those sales do not exhaust US patent rights, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ruled in a 10-2 decision.
The closely watched inkjet printer case hinged on the question of whether a patent owner can restrict what happens to its products after they are sold. It pitted the biotechnology, drug and crop industries against major Silicon Valley firms and sellers of refurbished auto parts and medical devices.
In siding with patent owners, Circuit Judge Richard Taranto cited drugs, which are often sold overseas at lower prices because of price constraints or medical needs.
“The practice could be disrupted by the increased arbitrage opportunities that would come from deeming US rights eliminated by a foreign sale made or authorized by the US patentee,” Taranto wrote for the majority.
Alphabet Inc’s Google, Intel Corp and Samsung Electronics Co were part of a group that argued that it should not matter where the product was originally sold.
“Development of new products frequently involves new combinations of existing components and technologies from around the world,” they said in a court filing.
Lexmark’s position “benefits the few US patentees engaging in impermissible rent-seeking” by getting paid multiple times for the same product, they said.
Not all tech companies agreed. Qualcomm Inc and Nokia Oyj, which have large numbers of patents and rely on licensing royalties to boost profit, backed Lexmark.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day