under state law, as determined by the North Carolina Court of Appeals Impact The ruling also let stand the district court's ruling of the impact of Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. on the exhaustion doctrine in the area of patent law. By finding that the sale of patented goods, even when subject to valid license restrictions, exhausts patent rights, it essentially gives Quanta a broad interpretation, which threatens to render unenforceable through patent law differential licensing schemes that attempt to distinguish separate fields of use for a patented item. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling in Lexmark Int'l, Inc. v. Impression Prods., Inc. reopened the issue. The Court held that after the sale of a patented item, the patent holder cannot sue for patent infringement relating to further use of that item, even when in violation of a contract with a customer or imported from outside the United States. Scope of federal statutory torts: 2014 ruling at the Supreme Court Appeal of the 2012 ruling The Circuit Court's ruling with respect to standing under the Lanham Act was appealed by Lexmark to the Supreme Court of the United States, on which certiorari was granted on June 3, 2013. The case was heard on December 3, 2013, and the question presented to the Court was: Lexmark argued in favour of the AGC test, while SCC argued that the appropriate test should actually be that of the "zone of interests" protected by the statute that has been applied in cases involving the Administrative Procedure Act, the Endangered Species Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. At the hearing, it appeared that Lexmark's submission received more intensive examination than SCC's. Decision On March 25, 2014, the US Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Sixth Circuit's holding that Static Control did have standing to sue under the Lanham Act. The Court developed a new test for assessing standing in false advertising, rejecting the existing tests, including the Sixth Circuit's "reasonable interest test". In that regard, the approach adopted by Scalia J. consists of several steps: Under Article III, the plaintiff must have suffered or be imminently threatened with a concrete and particularized "injury in fact" that is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision. AGC requires the ascertainment, as a matter of statutory