Princo Corp. v. International Trade Commission

 
APPEAL NO.
07-1386
OP. BELOW
ITC
SUBJECT
Patent
AUTHOR
Bryson

Question(s) Presented

“When a patentee offers to license a patent, does the patentee misuse that patent by inducing a third party not to license its separate, competitive technology?”

Holding

“Accordingly, we conclude that even if Philips and Sony engaged in an agreement not to license the Lagadec patent for non-Orange-Book purposes, that hypothesized agreement had no bearing on the physical or temporal scope of the patents in suit, nor did it have anticompetitive effects in the relevant market. The asserted agreement between Philips and Sony therefore did not constitute patent misuse and cannot justify rendering all of Philips’s Orange Book patents unenforceable.”