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Articles 1 - 30 of 127
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Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the "injurer-innovator problem." Patent law incentivizes injurers --often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs--by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own innovations. When the cost of self-implementation …
Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein
Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein
Faculty Scholarship
Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Faculty Scholarship
Trademark law exists to promote competition. If consumers know which companies make which products, they can more easily find the products they actually want to purchase. Trademark law has long treated “source significance”—the fact that a particular trademark is identified with a particular producer—as both necessary and sufficient for establishing a valid trademark. That is, trademark law has traditionally viewed source significance as the only necessary precondition for a trademark being pro-competitive. In this Article, we argue that this equation of source significance and pro-competitiveness is misguided. Some marks use words that are so closely connected with the product being …
There's No Such Thing As Independent Creation, And It's A Good Thing, Too, Christopher Buccafusco
There's No Such Thing As Independent Creation, And It's A Good Thing, Too, Christopher Buccafusco
Faculty Scholarship
Independent creation is the foundation of U.S. copyright law. A work is only original and, thus, copyrightable to the extent that it is independently created by its author and not copied from another source. And a work can be deemed infringing only if it is not independently created. Moreover, independent creation provides the grounding for all major theoretical justifications for copyright law. Unfortunately, the doctrine cannot bear the substantial weight that has been foisted upon it. This Article argues that copyright law’s independent creation doctrine rests on a set of discarded psychological assumptions about memory, copying, and creativity. When those …
Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Faculty Scholarship
To prove copyright infringement, a plaintiff must convince a jury that the defendant copied from the plaintiff’s work rather than independently creating it. To prove copying, especially cases involving music, it’s common for plaintiffs and their experts to argue that the similarities between the parties’ creative works are so great that it is simply implausible that the defendant’s work was created without copying from the plaintiff’s work. Unfortunately, in its present form, the argument is mathematically illiterate: It assumes, without any underlying evidence, that the experts know or could reasonably estimate how likely it is that a song with similarity …
Pay-To-Playlist: The Commerce Of Music Streaming, Christopher Buccafusco, Kristelia García
Pay-To-Playlist: The Commerce Of Music Streaming, Christopher Buccafusco, Kristelia García
Faculty Scholarship
Payola—sometimes referred to as “pay-for-play”—is the undisclosed payment, or acceptance of payment, in cash or in kind, for promotion of a song, album, or artist. Some form of pay-for-play has existed in the music industry since the nineteenth century. Most prominently, the term has been used to refer to the practice of musicians and record labels paying radio DJs to play certain songs in order to boost their popularity and sales. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the FCC has regulated this behavior—ostensibly because of its propensity to harm consumers and competition—by requiring that broadcasters disclose such payments.
As …
Thank You For Not Publishing (Unexamined Patent Applications), Lidiya Mishchenko
Thank You For Not Publishing (Unexamined Patent Applications), Lidiya Mishchenko
Faculty Scholarship
Since 2000, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (“PTO”) has published nearly all patent applications as they are submitted by applicants. Scholars and practitioners have praised this practice for providing timely notice of the potential legal rights the application may eventually cover. But maximizing timeliness and transparency in this way can also create significant costs, which may chill innovation and deter the development and funding of new research areas. This Article explores these often-unrecognized costs of publishing unexamined patent applications and proposes solutions that balance the benefits of early notice with the costs of patent system uncertainty.
Published patent applications …
Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp
Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp
Faculty Scholarship
The America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) created a robust administrative system—the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)—that provides a route for challenging the validity of granted patents outside of district courts. Congress determined that administrative adjudication of the validity of initial patent grants could be cheaper and more scientifically accurate than district court adjudication of such validity.
For private economic value per patent, few areas of technology can match the biopharmaceutical industry. This is particularly true for small-molecule drugs. A billion-dollar drug monopoly may be protected from competition by a relatively small number of patents. Accordingly, the social cost …
Mark Of The Devil: The University As Brand Bully, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Mark Of The Devil: The University As Brand Bully, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Faculty Scholarship
In recent years, universities have been accused in news stories of becoming “trademark bullies,” entities that use their trademarks to harass and intimidate beyond what the law can reasonably be interpreted to allow. Universities have also intensified efforts to gain expansive new marks. The Ohio State University’s attempt to trademark the word “the” is probably the most notorious. There has also been criticism of universities’ attempts to use their trademarks to police clearly legal speech about their activities. But beyond provocative anecdotes, how can one assess whether a particular university is truly bullying, since there are entirely legitimate reasons for …
Drugs, Patents, And Well-Being, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur
Drugs, Patents, And Well-Being, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur
Faculty Scholarship
The ultimate end of patent law should be to spur innovations that improve human welfare-innovations that make people better off. But firms will only invest resources in developing patentable inventions that will allow them to make money-that is, inventions that people will want to use and buy. This can gravely distort the types of incentives that firms face and the types of inventions they pursue. Nowhere is this truer than in the pharmaceutical field There is by now substantial evidence that treatments for diseases that primarily afflict poorer people-including the citizens of developing nations-are dramatically underproduced, compared with drugs that …
Copyright Exceptions Across Borders: Implementing The Marrakesh Treaty, Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji
Copyright Exceptions Across Borders: Implementing The Marrakesh Treaty, Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji
Faculty Scholarship
This article reviews state ratification and implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty since its conclusion in 2013. We find that most states have adhered closely to the Treaty’s text, thus creating a de facto global template of exceptions and limitations that has increasingly enabled individuals with print disabilities, libraries and schools to create accessible format copies and share them across borders. The article argues that the Marrakesh Treaty’s core innovation—mandatory exceptions to copyright to promote public welfare—together with consultations with a diverse range of stakeholders, may offer a model for harmonising human rights and IP in other contexts.
How Conceptual Art Challenges Copyright's Notions Of Authorial Control And Creativity, Christopher Buccafusco
How Conceptual Art Challenges Copyright's Notions Of Authorial Control And Creativity, Christopher Buccafusco
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Disability And Design, Christopher Buccafusco
Disability And Design, Christopher Buccafusco
Faculty Scholarship
When scholars contemplate the legal tools available to policymakers for encouraging innovation, they primarily think about patents. If they are keeping up with the most recent literature, they may also consider grants, prizes, and taxes as means to increase the supply of innovation. But the innovation policy toolkit is substantially deeper than that. To demonstrate its depth, this Article explores the evolution of designs that help people with disabilities access the world around them. From artificial limbs to the modern wheelchair and the reshaping of the built environment, a variety of legal doctrines have influenced, for better and for worse, …
The Trump Administration’S Social Security Rules Will Harm Innovation In The Assistive Technology Industry And People With Disabilities, Christopher Buccafusco, Mariel Talmage
The Trump Administration’S Social Security Rules Will Harm Innovation In The Assistive Technology Industry And People With Disabilities, Christopher Buccafusco, Mariel Talmage
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Design Patent Bar: An Occupational Licensing Failure, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Curtis
The Design Patent Bar: An Occupational Licensing Failure, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Curtis
Faculty Scholarship
Although any attorney can represent clients with complex property, tax, or administrative issues, only a certain class of attorneys can assist with obtaining and challenging patents before the United States Patent & Trademark Office (PTO). Only those who are members of the PTO 's patent bar can prosecute patents, and eligibility for the patent bar is only available to people with substantial scientific or engineering credentials. However much sense the eligibility rules make for utility patents-those based on novel scientific or technical inventions-they are completely irrational when applied to design patents-those based on ornamental or aesthetic industrial design. Nevertheless, the …
Fixing The Design Patent Bar: New Opportunities For Federal Lawyers, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Curtis
Fixing The Design Patent Bar: New Opportunities For Federal Lawyers, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Curtis
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Irrational Ignorance At The Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Irrational Ignorance At The Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
There is widespread belief that the Patent Office issues too many bad patents that impose significant harms on society. At first glance, the solution to the patent quality crisis seems straightforward: give patent examiners more time to review applications so they grant patents only to those inventions that deserve them. Yet the answer to the harms of invalid patents may not be that easy. It is possible that the Patent Office is, as Mark Lemley famously wrote, “rationally ignorant.” In Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office, Lemley argued that because so few patents are economically significant, it makes sense to …
Patent Trial And Appeal Board's Consistency-Enhancing Function, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Patent Trial And Appeal Board's Consistency-Enhancing Function, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
Agency heads, who have the primary responsibility for setting an agency's policy preferences, have a variety of tools by which they attempt to minimize the discretion of their staff officials in an effort to ensure agency policy preferences are consistently applied. One such mechanism is subjecting agency official's determinations to higher-level agency review. While scholars have long surmised that judges seek to minimize reversal of their decisions by a higher-level court, how agency officials' decisions are influenced by higher-level agency reconsideration has mostly eluded analysis.
In this Essay, we begin to fill this gap by examining the extent to which …
Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young
Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman
Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme
Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme
Faculty Scholarship
Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, such as enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically measure …
Preserving Film Preservation From The Right Of Publicity, Christopher J. Buccafusco, Jared Vasconcellos Grubow, Ian J. Postman
Preserving Film Preservation From The Right Of Publicity, Christopher J. Buccafusco, Jared Vasconcellos Grubow, Ian J. Postman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Risk Regulation And Innovation: The Case Of Rights-Encumbered Biomedical Data Silos, Arti K. Rai
Risk Regulation And Innovation: The Case Of Rights-Encumbered Biomedical Data Silos, Arti K. Rai
Faculty Scholarship
Recent Supreme Court cases on patent-eligible subject matter are likely to exacerbate the longstanding problem of biomedical data fragmentation. For each data silo, multiple overlapping legal claims and claimants must be addressed to achieve the benefits of pooling.
Commentators who have discussed the data aggregation challenge have generally focused on possibilities created through public funding, through collective action by research participants, or through pressure by payers. This Article emphasizes the important role of risk regulators, most notably the precedent offered by risk regulation in the area of clinical trial data.
While U.S. risk regulators have taken some positive steps, the …
Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer
Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer
Faculty Scholarship
Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has often been perplexing. Much of this difficulty arises from an unclear under-standing of the nature of functionality in fashion design. This Article proposes a robust account of fashion’s function. It argues that aspects of garment designs are functional not only when they affect the physical or technological performance of a garment but also when they affect the perception of the wearer’s body. Generally, clothes are not designed or chosen simply …
Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley
Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley
Faculty Scholarship
Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and design patents are much easier to obtain than utility patents, and they often last much longer. Accordingly, to prevent claimants from obtaining “backdoor patents,” the other IP doctrines must screen out functionality. As yet, however, courts and scholars have paid little systematic attention to the ways in which these functionality screens operate across and within IP law.
We have four tasks in …
The Nature Of Sequential Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Jon Sprigman
The Nature Of Sequential Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Jon Sprigman
Faculty Scholarship
When creators and innovators take up a new task, they face a world of existing creative works, inventions, and ideas, some of which are governed by intellectual property (IP) rights. This presents a choice: Should the creator pay to license those rights? Or, alternatively, should the creator undertake to innovate around them? Our Article formulates this “build on/build around decision” as the fundamental feature of sequential creativity, and it maps a number of factors—some legal, some contextual—that affect how creators are likely to decide between building on existing IP or building around it. Importantly, creators are influenced by more than …
Forgetting Functionality, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer
Forgetting Functionality, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer
Faculty Scholarship
In Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court had an opportunity to clarify copyright law’s treatment of product designs that incorporate functionality. Its opinion failed to do so in a host of different ways. In this comment (as part of the symposium From Shovels to Jerseys: A Guide to Apply Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands), we address just one of the opinion’s shortcomings: its failure to adequately define and distinguish between a design’s functional and expressive features. Not only does the Court’s neglect produce uncertainty for creators, litigants, and judges, the opinion makes it substantially easier …
Theft! A History Of Music, Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Theft! A History Of Music, Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Sharing By Design: Data And Decentralized Commons, Jorge L. Contreras, Jerome H. Reichman
Sharing By Design: Data And Decentralized Commons, Jorge L. Contreras, Jerome H. Reichman
Faculty Scholarship
Ambitious international data-sharing initiatives have existed for years in fields such as genomics, earth science, and astronomy. But to realize the promise of large-scale sharing of scientific data, intellectual property (IP), data privacy, national security, and other legal and policy obstacles must be overcome. While these issues have attracted significant attention in the corporate world, they have been less appreciated in academic and governmental settings, where solving issues of legal interoperability among data pools in different jurisdictions has taken a back seat to addressing technical challenges. Yet failing to account for legal and policy issues at the outset of a …
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman
Faculty Scholarship
We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination-time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.