(T-Fal) v. Montgomery Ward & Co. (Fed. Cir. 2010) concerne la contrefaçon contributoire selon laquelle quiconque incite la contrefaçon d’un brevet est lui-même passible de contrefaçon. Après que le défendeur eut déploré qu’il ne pouvait être coupable de contrefaçon parce qu’il n’avait aucune connaissance du brevet sous DSU Medical v. JMS la Federal Court déclara:
At the outset, this court notes that the Supreme Court has indicated, in a different civil context, that “deliberate indifference†is not necessarily a “should have known†standard. Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 840 (1994). The latter implies a solely objective test, whereas the former may require a subjective determination that the defendant knew of and disregarded the overt risk that an element of the offense existed. . . . For example, an accused infringer may defeat a showing of subjective deliberate indifference to the existence of a patent where it shows that it was genuinely “unaware even of an obvious risk.†More importantly, and as courts have observed in a variety of settings, the standard of deliberate indifference of a known risk is not different from actual knowledge, but is a form of actual knowledge. See, e.g., United States v. Carani, 492 F.3d 867 (7th Cir. 2007) (“Deliberate avoidance is not a standard less than knowledge; it is simply another way that knowledge may be proved.â€).:
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