Patent exhaustion doctrine and personal property rights and Basel

"Quanta, Wistron."

The Jeopardy question:   Which companies makes most Laptops,  Notebooks, and Tablets?

These Taiwanese companies make stuff as contract manufacturers, which Americans recognize by other brand names.  For Quanta (biggest competitor to Foxconn), the devices they manufacture include:

Acer, Alienware, Apple Inc., Cisco, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Gericom, Casper, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, LG, Maxdata, MPC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and Toshiba.

Also noteable for Quanta is the company's role as the "one laptop per child" manufacturer.  These are examples of the companies described in the Harvard Business Review article, "The Battle for China's Good Enough Market."   When a company excels at making a  product which is good enough for a person of modest means (3B3K), they become good at "scale", which will eventually lead to, well, Japan or South Korean economies.  What Honda, Toyota and Datsun did with autos which were "good enough" in the 1970s is happening today with electronics manufacturing.

But perhaps the most important contribution by the Taiwanese company is neither affordable manufacturing, sustainable takeback, nor even one-laptop per child.  In 2008, lawyers for Quanta stood up to massive opposition by monied interests and won a unanimous decision by the USA Supreme Court protecting property owners from "patent" rights, which some people want to extend to working and repairable product... a move I call "obsolescence in hindsight".  The court stood firm on the USA's definition of patent exhaustion doctrine, resisting efforts to extend patents to control personal property in other nations.