Global-Tech and Induced Infringement: Knowledge, Willful Blindness, and Patent Risk

A company can face U.S. patent exposure even when someone else performs the direct infringement. Global-Tech makes the mental-state requirement for inducement especially important: negligence is not enough, but deliberate efforts to avoid confirming a highly probable infringement fact can amount to willful blindness.

Inducement Starts With Someone Else’s Direct Infringement

Section 271(b) of the Patent Act provides that whoever actively induces infringement of a patent is liable as an infringer. In practice, inducement issues often arise in supply chains, software ecosystems, component sales, instructions for use, and products that customers configure or operate in a particular way.

The legal structure matters. There must be underlying direct infringement, and the accused inducer must have the required state of mind. Selling a product that can be used in an infringing manner is not automatically the same as intentionally inducing infringement.

What Global-Tech Required

In Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 563 U.S. 754 (2011), the Supreme Court held that induced infringement requires knowledge that the induced acts constitute patent infringement. The Court rejected the Federal Circuit’s broader “deliberate indifference to a known risk” formulation as insufficiently precise.

At the same time, the Court held that actual knowledge can be established through the doctrine of willful blindness. That doctrine prevents a defendant from deliberately insulating itself from a fact it strongly suspects and then claiming ignorance.

The Two Requirements of Willful Blindness

Global-Tech identified two basic requirements:

the defendant must subjectively believe that there is a high probability that the relevant fact exists; and
the defendant must take deliberate actions to avoid learning that fact.

The Court emphasized that this standard goes beyond recklessness and negligence. Passive failure to investigate is not automatically willful blindness. The doctrine targets deliberate avoidance.

“We did not know” is not always a safe factual position

If the record shows a strong subjective suspicion and deliberate steps to prevent confirmation, a court may treat that purposeful ignorance as equivalent to knowledge for inducement purposes.

Why the Case Is Particularly Relevant to Cross-Border Supply Chains

Global-Tech involved a deep-fryer manufacturer that copied an overseas version of SEB’s product and obtained a right-to-use opinion without telling its attorney that it had copied SEB’s design. The factual record supported the conclusion that the company had taken deliberate steps to avoid learning of the patent.

For suppliers, OEMs, and cross-border sellers, the lesson is not “search every patent before every sale.” It is that the factual pattern around knowledge matters. A warning letter, competitor product copied in development, patent notice from a customer, or internal discussion identifying a likely patent can change the risk profile. Instructions, marketing materials, technical support, or configuration guidance can then become relevant to whether the company intended customers to carry out infringing acts.

Commil: Belief in Invalidity Is Not the Same as Belief in Non-Infringement

The Supreme Court later clarified an important point in Commil USA, LLC v. Cisco Systems, Inc., 575 U.S. 632 (2015). A good-faith belief that a patent is invalid is not a defense to induced infringement. Validity and infringement are distinct issues with different presumptions and burdens.

That does not make validity analysis irrelevant. If a patent is actually held invalid, there is no enforceable patent to infringe. But a defendant cannot defeat the inducement mental-state element merely by saying it believed the patent should not have been valid.

FTO Should Ask Who Will Perform Each Claim Step

Product-level FTO often focuses on whether the company’s own product contains every element of a claim. For inducement risk, that is not always enough. The analysis may need to map:

which actor performs each claimed step;
whether the customer’s expected use creates direct infringement;
what instructions or support the supplier provides;
what the supplier knew about the patent and the customer’s use; and
whether the commercial design can be changed so the expected use no longer practices the claim.

This is especially important for software, connected devices, manufacturing systems, and components whose legally significant function appears only after integration downstream.

What to Do After a Material Patent Comes to Attention

A company that learns of a potentially relevant patent should not confuse disciplined investigation with creating liability. Section 298 prevents the mere failure to obtain advice of counsel from being used to prove inducement intent. But if a material risk is already known, a sensible response is to understand the claim, the downstream use, and the available non-infringement, redesign, or validity positions rather than deliberately avoiding the issue.

Documentation also matters. Later litigation may focus less on what executives say they remember and more on contemporaneous instructions, engineering records, customer communications, and the sequence of decisions after the patent was identified.

The Practical Takeaway

Global-Tech makes inducement a state-of-mind issue as well as a technical one. A supply-chain FTO should therefore examine not only the physical product, but also downstream use, instructions, knowledge, and deliberate avoidance. Patent risk can travel through how a product is sold and used—not only through what sits inside the box.