3 ms·
Admittedly my answer was U.S.-centric, but to be clear: The United States provides no such exception, while about 60 countries do seem to.
by elbigbad 11y ago
Admittedly my answer was U.S.-centric, but to be clear: The United States provides no such exception, while about 60 countries do seem to.
- microcolonel 11y agoI don't think it would hold up in court.
- OopsCriticality 11y agoIt has been held up in court, repeatedly, even against Duke University who argued in favor of an academic research exemption.
- logfromblammo 11y agoThe U.S. has no explicit exception, but 49 of the states operate under Anglo-American common law (Louisiana being the exception). By what I know of it, producing a patented invention for your own purposes, outside the stream of commerce, is neither crime nor tort at common law, as no one has been provably harmed by it. As a potential juror, I do not find the "lost sale" theory of harm to be credible from any vendor operating a monopoly, state-protected or otherwise. One presumes that, according to microeconomic theory, the monopolist restricts its supply to increase sale prices, and that it is able to sell as much as it is willing to produce at that price. If it wished to sell one more, it would have produced one more, and also lowered the sale price by a marginal amount. Since it did not, it is clear that the monopolist was not harmed by being unable to sell to the infringer, because the monopolist never intended to sell that many goods in the first place. Nevertheless, many judges in the U.S. are far more willing to nail you to the wall with statutory law on dubious grounds before allowing you to argue anything from common law.