Rubber Company v. Goodyear Rubber Company v. Goodyear Rubber Co. v. Goodyear, 76 U.S. (9 Wall.) 788 (1869), is an early decision of the United States Supreme Court recognizing the right of a patent owner to license another person to practice the invention only in a limited field, and holding that such a licensee committed patent infringement when it made and sold products of the invention outside that field. Charles Goodyear invented a process for "vulcanizing" rubber by heating it to a high temperature in the presence of sulfur and lead carbonate or another chemical, so that it was converted from a soft, sticky,
Union Sulphur Company the Supreme Court, which declined to review the Third Circuit opinion. The competitors were free to use the Frasch Process. The Union Sulphur Company continued to extract sulfur, averaging over 200,000 tons per year from 1905 to 1911 and eventually producing a total of almost 9.5 million tons. Sulfur has many industrial uses, including as sulfuric acid and in the manufacture of explosives, among others. The Union Sulphur Company, as the primary source of sulfur in the U.S. before and during World War I, was critical to the U.S. war effort. As the legal battle over the expiration of its