On Wed, 31 May 2017 20:37:12 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
"The [US] Supreme Court struck a blow today 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..."
This is strike three for Lexmark, which previously tried to use copyright and trademark law to discourage people from buying third-party ink cartridges. Losing the patent case completes the trifecta; is there anything else it can try? By the way, that “lower court” was of course the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is notoriously “intellectual-property”-happy. That was the same appeals court that said that APIs could be copyrighted in the Oracle-versus-Google case. This is not the first time the Supreme Court has slapped down the CAFC; one would expect it won’t be the last... <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170530/10152837476/strike-three-lexmark-cant-use-patents-trademarks-copyright-to-block-third-party-ink-cartridges.shtml>