NOTE 9. COMMITMENTS AND CONTINGENCIES Purchase Commitments. We have purchase commitments, comprising of supply and inventory related agreements, totaling approximately $12.8 million as of December 31, 2013. These purchase order commitments include our purchase obligations with SMB of Denmark to purchase VS pro specialty analyzers and related cartridges and Diatron MI PLC of Hungary to purchase Diatron hematology instruments. Patent Licensing Agreement. Effective January 2009, we entered into a license agreement with Alere. Under our license agreement, we licensed co-exclusively certain worldwide patent rights related to lateral flow immunoassay technology in the field of animal health diagnostics in the professional marketplace. The license agreement provides that Alere may not grant any future rights to any third parties under its current lateral flow patent rights in the animal health diagnostics field in the professional marketplace. The license agreement enables us to develop and market products under rights from Alere to address animal health and laboratory animal research markets. In exchange for the license rights, we (i) paid an up-front license fee of $5.0 million to Alere in January 2009, (ii) agreed to pay royalties during the term of the agreement, based solely on sales of products in a jurisdiction country covered by valid and unexpired claims in that jurisdiction under the licensed Alere patent rights, and (iii) agreed to pay a yearly minimum license fee of between $500,000 to $1.0 million per year, which fee will be creditable against any royalties due during such calendar year. The royalties, if any, are payable through the date of the expiration of the last valid patent licensed under the agreement that includes at least one claim in a jurisdiction covering products we sell in that jurisdiction. The yearly minimum fees are payable for so long as we desire to maintain exclusivity under the agreement. Litigation. On June 28, 2010, we filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Cepheid. On September