National Lockwasher owned U.S. Patent 1,655,018, which covered split-ring, compression-spring lock washers with a construction preventing them from interlinking with one another when handled in bulk.

Each license "contained a provision to the effect that the licensee agrees, while the agreement is in force, that it will not manufacture any other form of non-tangling spring washers except those covered by the patent in suit."

Accordingly: "The patentee has disentitled itself to recover at present for infringement by reason of its utilization of its patent monopoly to drive unpatented competing goods from the market.

In Berlenbach v. Anderson and Thompson Ski Co.,[8] the Ninth Circuit upheld a dismissal of a complaint for patent misuse.

The offending license provided that the licensee "shall not manufacture or distribute in the United States and Canada any other safety type or automatic releasing ski binding other than" the patented one.

In Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds,[12] a copyright misuse case, the Fourth Circuit found misuse where the plaintiff copyright owner licensed its computer-assisted die-making software with agreements that forbade the licensee from permitting its personnel "to write, develop, produce or sell [competing] computer assisted die making software."

was the claimed horizontal agreement between Philips and Sony to restrict the availability of the Lagadec patent—an entirely different patent that was never asserted in the infringement action against Princo.

No precedent so holds, he insisted, and it did not fit within the requirement for misuse that the Philips-Sony agreement "have the effect of increasing the physical or temporal scope of the patent in suit."

The 2015 decision of the Supreme Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC,[15] however, may call the soundness of Princo into question.