Florian Mueller (yes, [1]) says this is very bad news for Qualcomm. He quotes Roberts' decision:
"The problem with the Federal Circuit's logic is that the exhaustion doctrine is not a presumption about the authority that comes along with a sale; it is a limit on the scope of the patentee's rights. The Patent Act gives patentees a limited exclusionary power, and exhaustion extinguishes that power. A purchaser has the right to use, sell or import an item because those are the rights that come along with ownership, not because it purchased authority to engage in those practices from the patentee."
Then recaps FTC v Qualcomm:
Presumably, some people in another Washington DC building are now reading the Supreme Court decision: the lawyers working on the FTC's case against Qualcomm. The FTC argued in its January complaint, under a headline that describes Qualcomm's "no license-no chips" policy as "anomalous among component suppliers," that "when one of Qualcomm's competitors sells a baseband processor to an OEM, the OEM can use or resell the processor without obtaining a separate patent license from the competitor—just as a consumer buying a smartphone does not have to obtain a separate patent license from the seller of the smartphone." The FTC went on to explain that "Qualcomm is unique in requiring an OEM, as a condition of sale, to secure a separate patent license requiring royalty payments for handsets that use a competitor's components." For example, this would apply to a situation in which a device maker is a customer of Qualcomm and, say, Intel or Samsung's component business.
And Apple v Qualcomm including relevance of overseas sales portion of today's decision:
Count XXIII of Apple's antitrust complaint against Qualcomm is a request for judicial "declaration of unenforceability [of Qualcomm's patents in certain contexts] due to exhaustion." Apple alleged in its January complaint that "Qualcomm has sought, and continues to seek, separate patent license fees from Apple's [contract manufacturers] for patents embodied in the chipsets Qualcomm sells to Apple's CMs, a practice that is prohibited under the patent exhaustion doctrine." ... Apple's complaint already anticipated that Qualcomm would point to its corporate structure: "Qualcomm has attempted to evade the patent exhaustion doctrine by selling baseband processor chipsets to Apple's [contract manufacturers] through QTC, which is operated by QTI, which is in turn a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm." Apple then points to Qualcomm's 2012 restructuring, which I already blogged about back then with a focus on open-source licensing issues. The Supreme Court's broad and inclusive approach to exhaustion simply doesn't allow any kind of end-run around the exhaustion doctrine through a first sale outside the United States as in one of the two issues relevant in the Lexmark case.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2017/05/supreme-court-rules-again...
[1] Yes it's FM but his analysis here seems better than it did 6+ years ago. I don't remember him saying things like this in the oracle case: "The good news is that the Supreme Court has once again overruled the Federal Circuit in a way that strengthens those defending themselves against attempts to gain excessive leverage and extract overcompensation from patents."