Opinion ID: 2812948
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Customer Invocation of Kessler

Text: SpeedTrack submits that, if Kessler is still good law, it should be limited to its “original footprint.” Appellant Br. 52. SpeedTrack asserts that Kessler does not apply to the facts presented here because the Supreme Court explicitly reserved the question of whether a customer is entitled to invoke Kessler and we should conclude that a customer may not do so. We decline to limit Kessler as SpeedTrack urges. The question of whether a customer can invoke the Kessler doctrine has divided circuits, and we have not specifically addressed it. See Tech. Licensing Corp. v. 16 SPEEDTRACK, INC. v. OFFICE DEPOT, INC. Thomson, Inc., 738 F. Supp. 2d 1096, 1101 (E.D. Cal. 2010) (“The Supreme Court, Federal Circuit, and Ninth Circuit[] . . . have declined to address the issue of whether the customer has the right to invoke the Kessler doctrine as a defense to patent infringement suits.”). For its part, the Fourth Circuit has said that a customer can raise the Kessler doctrine as a defense to suit. Gen. Chem. Co. v. Standard Wholesale Phosphate & Acid Works, Inc., 101 F.2d 178, 179-80 (4th Cir. 1939). In that case, the court recognized that, after Kessler, a manufacturer, successful in an infringement suit, could intervene in a suit “by the patentee against one of the manufacturer’s customers and have the suit dismissed on the sole ground of the prior adjudication.” Id. at 180 (citation omitted). The court reasoned that, “if the suit against the customer may be dismissed upon the intervention and at the request of the manufacturer, there is no valid reason why it may not be dismissed upon the motion of the customer himself.” Id. (“Since the customer can hold the manufacturer from whom he has purchased for any damage which he may be required to pay because the article infringes the patent, he should be held to be subrogated to the right of the manufacturer under the judgment against the patentee adjudging that there is no infringement with respect to such article.”); see also Molinaro v. Am. Tel. & Tel. Co., 460 F. Supp. 673, 675-76 (E.D. Pa. 1978) (citing General Chemical for the proposition that “[c]ourts soon recognized that the rationale underlying the Kessler doctrine would support the assertion not only by a manufacturer, but also by a customer, of the preclusive effect of a prior judgment in favor of the manufacturer-supplier and against the patentee”). The Sixth Circuit has reached the opposite conclusion, noting that the “cause of action against the manufacturer for injunction and damages and accounting is, in general, a distinct cause of action from that against the purchasing user for an injunction against him and for damages and SPEEDTRACK, INC. v. OFFICE DEPOT, INC. 17 profits coming from his infringement.” Wenborne-Karpen Dryer Co. v. Dort Motor Car Co., 14 F.2d 378, 379 (6th Cir. 1926). The court found that, “[a]lthough plaintiff had a suit pending against the manufacturer in another circuit, it had the (initial) right to sue a user in this circuit and get the judgment of different courts as to the patent.”