darkSpyro

So what's the big deal?

The practical question is how much Lexmark or any other company can control what you do with the things you buy. This debate isn't limited to printer cartridges. If you buy a car, how do you know you really own it? What does ownership actually entitle you to do with your property, anyway?

These issues fit into a broader fight over what some experts call the “right to tinker.” The thinking goes: If you buy something, you should be free to do whatever you want with it — sell it, modify it, even destroy it. But some companies, even car manufacturers, have sought to put limits on that freedom. They make arguments such as Lexmark's, where handling a product in a way that potentially undermines the company's business leads to an alleged violation of patent or copyright protections. In this view, the customer may think she owns the physical property outright, but she is still constrained by an invisible cage made of corporate intellectual property.

The Supreme Court disagreed with this view. To help make its case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. used an analogy:

Take a shop that restores and sells used cars. The business works because the shop can rest assured that, so long as those bringing in the cars own them, the shop is free to repair and resell those vehicles. That smooth flow of commerce would sputter if companies that make the thousands of parts that go into a vehicle could keep their patent rights after the first sale.

Roberts went on to say that the used car shop could be sued by patent holders under such a system, and that even if the parts makers didn't follow through, the implied threat of lawsuits would be enough to force the shop to spend lots of money to safeguard against them.

What Roberts is saying has enormous implications for the economy, which depends not only on consumers buying things from companies, but also companies buying from consumers, and individual consumers trading with each other. It also affects people building new innovations in their garage out of off-the-shelf products. In short, what you can do with the stuff you buy has real ramifications for America's way of life.