earticle

영어

Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion or first sale rules, once a patent owner has sold, without limitation, an article that fully embodies a patented invention, he has no further right of exclusion for the use or resale of the article against the purchaser. That is, first authorized sale of a patented product places the article outside the patent owner's right of exclusion. The reason why a patentee cannot enforce against the purchaser is that the patentee's exclusive right of embodied patent in the product was used up once he has sold or licensed it. This study, therefore, has scrutinized almost all cases involving with patent exhaustion issues in the United States and Japan; as a result, it may provide clear guidances and standards for application to patent exhaustion in patent infringement suits. The important limitation on the doctrine of patent exhaustion is that it does not apply if the patent claims do not cover/read the product sold by a patentee or its licensee. Eventually if an alleged claim does not covered or read the products sold, the lawsuit would be failed since it does not create patent infringement. This is why the claim(s) to de covered a certain products. In addition, in LG Electronics., Inc. v. Asustek Computer, Inc. the courts held that the apparatus claim was exhausted but the method claim was not exhausted. That is, the doctrine did not apply to the asserted method claims because the claims could not read on the sold product. Notwithstanding a steady negative holdings as to method claims, this study would like to suggest that any method claims which are substantially identical to apparatus claims be exhausted. In addition, a flowchart which is pertinent to the suggestion has been showed apprehensively in this paper.