Law360, New York (December 15, 2015, 11:03 AM EST) -- The Federal Circuit is facing a rare opportunity to clarify and correct a muddled area of the law: contracting around patent exhaustion. Previously, in Mallinckrodt Inc. v. Medipart Inc.,[1] the Federal Circuit had allowed a patentee to use a single-use restriction on patented medical equipment that it sold directly to various hospitals — who then violated that post-sale restriction — as a mechanism for saving its patent rights from exhaustion. More recently, after a panel hearing but before the decision, Chief Judge Sharon Prost's bench sua sponte ordered an en banc hearing of the conditional sale issue in Lexmark International Inc. v. Impression Products Inc.[2] Oral arguments were heard on Oct. 2, 2015, during which the bench posed a question that neither of the parties nor the U.S. government as an amicus curiae had briefed: whether a rights holder's patent remedies survive a sale by an authorized licensee to a purchaser who knows the terms of the license and intends to violate them at the time of sale....