[$] Patent exhaustion and open source

When patents and free software crop up together, theusual question is about patent licensing. Patent exhaustion -the principle that patent rights don't reach past the firstsale of a product - is muchless frequently discussed. At FOSDEM 2019,US lawyer Van Lindberg argued that several US courtdecisions related to exhaustion, most of them recent but some less so,could come togetherto have surprising beneficial effects for free software. He was clear that theargument applied only in the US but, since court systems tend tolook to each other for consistency's sake, and because Lindberg is anengaging speaker, the talk was of great interest even in Brussels.