U.S. Philips Corp. v. International Trade Com'n, 04-1361.
| Decision Date | 21 September 2005 |
| Docket Number | No. 04-1361.,04-1361. |
| Citation | 424 F.3d 1179 |
| Parties | U.S. PHILIPS CORPORATION, Appellant, v. INTERNATIONAL TRADE COMMISSION, Appellee, and Princo Corporation, Princo America Corporation, Gigastorage Corporation Taiwan, Gigastorage Corporation USA, and Linberg Enterprise Inc., Intervenors. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Federal Circuit |
A. Douglas Melamed, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, of Washington, DC, argued for appellant. With him on the brief were William J. Kolasky, Edward C. DuMont, Jonathan G. Cedarbaum, and Barbara R. Blank.
Clara Kuehn, Attorney, Office of General Counsel, United States International Trade Commission, of Washington, DC, argued for appellee. With her on the brief were James M. Lyons, Acting General Counsel, and Wayne W. Herrington, Acting Deputy General Counsel for Litigation.
Alan D. Smith, Fish & Richardson P.C., of Boston, Massachusetts, argued for intervenors. With him on the brief were Charles H. Sanders of Boston, Massachusetts; and Richard G. Green and Tina M. Chappell, of Washington, DC. Of counsel was Ahmed J. Davis, of Washington, DC.
John DeQ. Briggs, III, Howrey Simon Arnold & White, LLP, of Washington, DC, for amicus curiae Intellectual Property Owners Association. With him on the brief were Marc G. Schildkraut and Joseph P. Lavelle. Of counsel on the brief was J. Jeffrey Hawley, President, Intellectual Property Owners Association, of Washington, DC.
David F. Ryan, Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto, of New York, New York, for amicus curiae New York Intellectual Property Law Association. With him on the brief was Matthew S. Seidner. Of counsel on the brief was John D. Murnane, President, New York Intellectual Property Law Association, of New York, New York. Of counsel was Joseph B. Divinagracia.
Before BRYSON, GAJARSA, and LINN, Circuit Judges.
U.S. Philips Corporation appeals from a final order of the United States International Trade Commission, in which the Commission held six of Philips's patents for the manufacture of compact discs to be unenforceable because of patent misuse. The Commission ruled that Philips had employed an impermissible tying arrangement because it required prospective licensees to license packages of patents rather than allowing them to choose which individual patents they wished to license and making the licensing fee correspond to the particular patents designated by the licensees. In re Certain Recordable Compact Discs & Rewritable Compact Discs, Inv. No. 337-TA-474 (Int'l Trade Comm'n Mar. 25, 2004). We reverse and remand.
Philips owns patents to technology for manufacturing recordable compact discs ("CD-Rs") and rewritable compact discs ("CD-RWs") in accordance with the technical standards set forth in a publication called the Recordable CD Standard (the "Orange Book"), jointly authored by Philips and Sony Corporation. Since the 1990s, Philips has been licensing those patents through package licenses. Philips specified that the same royalty was due for each disc manufactured by the licensee using patents included in the package, regardless of how many of the patents were used. Potential licensees who sought to license patents to the technology for manufacturing CD-Rs or CD-RWs were not allowed to license those patents individually and were not offered a lower royalty rate for licenses to fewer than all the patents in a package.
Initially, Philips offered four different pools of patents for licensing: (1) a joint CD-R patent pool that included patents owned by Philips and two other companies (Sony and Taiyo Yuden); (2) a joint CD-RW patent pool that included patents owned by Philips and two other companies (Sony and Ricoh); (3) a CD-R patent pool that included only patents owned by Philips; and (4) a CD-RW patent pool that included only patents owned by Philips. After 2001, Philips offered additional package options by grouping its patents into two categories, which Philips denominated "essential" and "nonessential" for producing compact discs compliant with the technical standards set forth in the Orange Book.
In the late 1990s, Philips entered into package licensing agreements with Princo Corporation and Princo America Corporation (collectively, "Princo"); GigaStorage Corporation Taiwan and GigaStorage Corporation USA (collectively, "GigaStorage"); and Linberg Enterprise Inc. ("Linberg"). Soon after entering into the agreements, however, Princo, GigaStorage, and Linberg stopped paying the licensing fees. Philips filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission that Princo, GigaStorage and Linberg, among others, were violating section 337(a)(1)(B) of the Tariff Act of 1930; 19 U.S.C. § 1337(a)(1)(B), by importing into the United States certain CD-Rs and CD-RWs that infringed six of Philips's patents.
The Commission instituted an investigation and identified 19 respondents, including GigaStorage and Linberg. Additional respondents, including Princo, were added through intervention. In the course of the proceedings before an administrative law judge, the respondents raised patent misuse as an affirmative defense, alleging that Philips had improperly forced them, as a condition of licensing patents that were necessary to manufacture CD-Rs or CD-RWs, to take licenses to other patents that were not necessary to manufacture those products. In particular, the respondents argued that a number of the patents that Philips had included in the category of "essential" patents were actually not essential for manufacturing compact discs compliant with the Orange Book standards, because there were commercially viable alternative methods of manufacturing CD-Rs and CD-RWs that did not require the use of the technology covered by those patents. The allegedly nonessential patents included U.S. Patent Nos. 5,001,692 ("the Farla patent"), 5,740,149 ("the Iwasaki patent"), Re. 34,719 ("the Yamamoto patent"), and 5,060,219 ("the Lokhoff patent").
The administrative law judge ruled that the intervenors had infringed various claims of the six asserted Philips patents. The administrative law judge further ruled, however, that all six of the asserted patents were unenforceable by reason of patent misuse. Among the grounds invoked by the administrative law judge for finding patent misuse was his conclusion that the package licensing arrangements constituted tying arrangements that were illegal under analogous antitrust law principles and thus rendered the subject patents unenforceable.
Philips petitioned the Commission for review of the administrative law judge's decision. In an order that addressed only the findings concerning patent misuse, the Commission affirmed the administrative law judge's ruling that Philips's package licensing practice "constitutes patent misuse per se as a tying arrangement between (1) licenses to patents that are essential to manufacture CD-Rs or CD-RWs according to Orange Book standards and (2) licenses to other patents that are not essential to that activity." The Commission found that the Farla, Iwasaki, Yamamoto, and Lokhoff patents were not essential to manufacturing CD-Rs or CD-RWs. Specifically, the Commission found that the Farla and Lokhoff patents were nonessential with respect to the Philips-only CD-RW and CD-R licenses, and that the Farla, Iwasaki, Yamamoto, and Lokhoff patents were nonessential with respect to the joint CD-RW license. The Commission concluded that the four nonessential patents were impermissibly tied to patents that were essential to manufacturing CD-Rs and CD-RWs, because "none of the so-called essential patents could be licensed individually for the manufacture of CD-RWs and CD-Rs apart from the package" that Philips denominated as "essential." The Commission also found, based on the administrative law judge's findings and analysis, that the joint license for CD-R and CD-RW technology unlawfully tied patents for CD-Rs and CD-RWs in accordance with the Orange Book standards to patents that were not essential to manufacture such discs.
The Commission explained why it concluded that each of the four patents was nonessential. According to the Commission, the Farla and Iwasaki patents were not essential because there was an economically viable alternative method of writing information to discs that did not require the producer to practice those patents; the Yamamoto patent was not essential because there was a potential alternative method of creating master discs that did not require the producer to practice that patent; and the Lokhoff patent was not essential because there were alternative possible methods of accomplishing copy protection that did not require the producer to practice that patent. Based on those findings, the Commission concluded that the four "nonessential" patents constituted separate products from the patents that were essential to the manufacture of the subject discs.
The Commission ruled that Philips's patent package licensing arrangement constituted per se patent misuse because Philips did not give prospective licensees the option of licensing individual patents (presumably for a lower fee) rather than licensing one or more of the patent packages as a whole. The Commission took no position on the administrative law judge's ruling that patent pooling arrangements between Philips and its colicensors constituted patent misuse per se based on the theories of price fixing and price discrimination, and it took no position on the administrative law judge's conclusion that the royalty structure of the patent pools was an unreasonable restraint of trade.
As an alternative ground, the Commission concluded that even if Philips's patent package licensing practice was not per se patent misuse, it constituted patent misuse under the rule of reason. Adopting the administrative law judge's findings, the Commission ruled that the anticompetitive effects of including nonessential patents in the packages of...
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