western field 175

General Talking Pictures Corp. v. Western Electric Co., 304 U.S. 175 (1938), was a case that the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1938. The decision upheld so-called field-of-use limitations in patent licenses: it held that the limitations were enforceable in a patent infringement suit in federal court against the licensee and those acting in concert with it—for example, a customer that knowingly buys a patented product from the licensee that is outside the scope of the license.A field-of-use limitation is a provision in a patent license that limits the scope of what the patent owner authorizes a manufacturing licensee (that is, a licensee that manufactures a patented product or performs a patented process) to use the patent to make a specified product or do specified things. The license specifies a defined field of permissible operation or specifies fields from which the licensee is excluded. By way of example, such a license might authorize a licensee to manufacture patented engines only for incorporation into trucks, or to manufacture such engines only for sale to farmers, or only engines rated from 100 to 200 horsepower. More generally, this kind of license permits the licensee to use the patented invention in some, but not all, possible ways in which the invention could be exploited. In an exclusive field-of-use license the licensee is the only person authorized to use the invention in the field of the license.The General Talking Pictures doctrine does not apply to all cases in which a patent owner imposes a restriction on what may subsequently be done with the patented product. When the patent owner sells a patented product to a customer, for example, the exhaustion doctrine applies instead and the patent no longer operates to limit what the customer does with the product or in what field the customer uses it.

View More On Wikipedia.org