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Abstract Study on the Domestic Industry Requirement in a U.S. ITC Patent Infringement Lawsuit Shim Mirang* The U.S. International Trade Commission ( ITC ) has recently become a popular venue for non-practicing entities to enforce their patent rights. Traditionally, section 337 of the Tariff Act required ITC complainants to be engaged in domestic manufacturing and demonstrate injuries to their manufacturing activities. Today, both requirements have been eliminated, dramatically increasing the presence of non-practicing entities at the ITC. Because the ITC is an administrative agency, not a federal court, ebay s discretionary test for injunctive relief does t apply. And because the ITC can t award monetary damages, it has tended to grant injunctions as a matter of course. This article challenges the ITC s role in enforcing the patent rights of such entities. The article proceeds as follows, first, discusses the ITC s recent rise in popularity and provides a history of section 337. Next part describes the domestic industry requirement and how it has evolved through statutory changes and ITC decisions, explaining in particular the 1988 Amendments that both allowed licensing to constitute a protectable domestic industry. Then this article outlines the ITC s standards in determining whether a complainant s licensing * Associate Research Fellow/ Ph.D in Law, Korea Institute of Intellectual Property (KIIP). 389
activities are sufficient to meet the domestic industry requirement. In InterDigital Communications, LLC v. International Trade Commission(Fed. Cir. Jan. 10, 2013), the Federal Circuit denied a combined petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc concerning the domestic industry requirement of section 337, explaining that a party s patent licensing activities may satisfy this requirement, even if no domestic party manufactures any article protected by the patent. Finally, the last part of this article argues that section 337 should be amended to require licensing complainants to demonstrate an injury to their domestic industry before obtaining an exclusion order and also the ITC should use the flexibility to craft exclusion orders that limit the ability of a patentee to extract settlements that exceed the economic value of the patent, a practice called patent holdup. Key Words : patent infringement, injunction for patent infringement, injunction, exclusion order, domestic industry, public interest, patent troll, Non- Practicing Entity(NPE), Patent Assertion Entity(PAE), International Trade Commission(ITC) 390