Page:Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int’l, Inc. Decision.pdf/24

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concurring in part and dissenting in part.

I concur in the Court’s holding regarding domestic exhaustion—a patentee who sells a product with an express restriction on reuse or resale may not enforce that restriction through an infringement lawsuit, because the U. S. sale exhausts the U. S. patent rights in the product sold. See ante, at 5–13. I dissent, however, from the Court’s holding on international exhaustion. A foreign sale, I would hold, does not exhaust a U. S. inventor’s U. S. patent rights.

Patent law is territorial. When an inventor receives a U. S. patent, that patent provides no protection abroad. See Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp., 406 U. S. 518, 531 (1972) (“Our patent system makes no claim to extraterritorial effect.”). See also 35 U. S. C. §271(a) (establishing liability for acts of patent infringement “within the United States” and for “import[ation] into the United States [of] any patented invention”). A U. S. patentee must apply to each country in which she seeks the exclusive right to sell her invention. Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 550 U. S. 437, 456 (2007) (“[F]oreign law alone, not United States law, currently governs the manufacture and sale of components of patented inventions in foreign countries.”). See also Convention at Brussels, An