Brulotte failed to pay the royalties and Thys sued him for breach of contract in Washington State court.

Justice Douglas began the majority opinion by citing precedents holding that patent "rights become public property once the 17-year period expires.

[7]The Court rejected the claim that the contract merely spread the payment for using the patent over a longer period.

[8] The Court therefore ruled: n light of those considerations, we conclude that a patentee's use of a royalty agreement that projects beyond the expiration date of the patent is unlawful per se.

If that device were available to patentees, the free market visualized for the post-expiration period would be subject to monopoly influences that have no proper place there.

A patent empowers the owner to exact royalties as high as he can negotiate with the leverage of that monopoly.

[9]Justice Harlan disagreed: " I think that more discriminating analysis than the Court has seen fit to give this case produces a different result.

In a subsequent opinion, 50 years later, nonetheless affirming Brulotte, the Supreme Court listed some of the criticism suggesting that the case should be overruled:[12] Other criticism of Brulotte includes the following: Other commentators, however, have rejected adoption of an antitrust lens for analysis of patent misuse: The citations in this article are written in Bluebook style.