The doctrines of "first sale" in copyright and "exhaustion" in patents stem from a common policy concern -- to permit the free flow of trade. Once a rights holder sells an article protected by the IP, the rights holder cannot later assert infringement against a re-sale of that same article. In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons,¹ the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided that the foreign sale of the copyrighted article will trigger the "first sale" doctrine, thereby allowing import of that article into the U.S. However, the Supreme Court has declined to preside over the same issue for patents.² Therefore, a U.S. patent is only exhausted by an authorized U.S. sale, despite an authorized sale abroad.³ Unlike in copyright, if the patented article is sold legally through a foreign sales channel, the U.S. patent holder may still preclude that product from entering into the U.S. market. While patent holders enjoy this additional barrier to entry of imported goods, there are still additional considerations for further protection against parallel imports. For instance, a common business model is to sell an expensive durable good to be used with a non-durable consumable part. These can range from common items such as printers and their ink cartridges to more sophisticated products such as medical imaging systems and their re-recordable media. Rights holders can prevent sale of the durable good from exhausting their rights in the consumable part through patent strategies and use restrictions. This is especially important where the consumable part can be originated from countries with low cost manufacturing or remanufacturing.