Dominic Frisina

Can the Lanham Act apply to the conduct of foreign entities occurring entirely outside the United States and, if so, what is the test? The Supreme Court will soon decide this issue in Abitron v. Hetronic, potentially resolving a long-standing circuit split where six different tests presently co-exist. It will mark the first time since the Court’s 1952 ruling in Steele v. Bulova Watch Co. that it has spoken on extraterritoriality as it relates to the Lanham Act. Steele found that the Lanham Act does apply to a U.S. citizen using a registered U.S. trademark on spurious Bulova watches, many of which were bought by U.S. citizens in Mexico and brought back to the United States. Steele did not address whether the defendant’s U.S. citizenship, or his sourcing of parts from U.S. suppliers, were necessary conditions to subject matter jurisdiction. Enter Hetronic.

As I write this, the United States Supreme Court is deciding whether to grant certiorari in the American Axle case, setting the stage for another sea change in patent eligibility law. In 2020, the Federal Circuit issued a puzzling opinion penned by Judge Dyk finding American Axle’s method of manufacturing drive shaft assemblies (U.S. Pat. No. 7,774,911) to be a patent in-eligible law of nature. Specifically, claim 22 of the ‘911 patent recites “tuning a mass and a stiffness of at least one liner” and inserting the liner into a drive shaft such that it damps certain vibrational modes. Fig. 4 shows the liner (204) at the center of the dispute in green.