"Daniel Nazer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents, said in a phone interview with The Register, "There's a risk companies will increasingly turn to patent law to do things they're not otherwise allowed to do."
Nazer pointed to a shampoo maker that tried unsuccessfully to block the importation of a product into the US by asserting a copyright claim on the shampoo bottle label. He observed that a design patent claim could be employed in an attempt to achieve the same anti-competitive result.
"What these companies are trying to do is use a contract with a consumer, that they have no intention of enforcing against the consumer, as an end-run around patent exhaustion," he said."
- Date Published:01/24/2017
- Original Publication:The Register