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Zombie Patents And Zombie Companies With Patents, Xuan-Thao Nguyen
Zombie Patents And Zombie Companies With Patents, Xuan-Thao Nguyen
Articles
While a zombie is the undead and has no expiration, patents do. A patent comes into existence the moment the government, through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), examines the invention application and issues a grant of patent. From that birth, a patent will have a lifetime of only twenty years from the date of filing the application. Patents expire and have no life after the twenty-year period.
Some patents die when the patentees abandon them by not paying maintenance fees. Dead patents must remain dead and become part of the public domain. Unfortunately, this Essay observes that …
Mandated Disclosure In Literary Hybrid Speech, Zahr K. Said
Mandated Disclosure In Literary Hybrid Speech, Zahr K. Said
Articles
This Article, written for the Washington Law Review’s 2013 Symposium, The Disclosure Crisis, argues that hidden sponsorship creates a form of non-actionable influence rather than causing legally cognizable deception that mandatory disclosure can and should cure.
The Article identifies and calls into question three widely held assumptions underpinning much of the regulation of embedded advertising, or hidden sponsorship, in artistic communications. The first assumption is that advertising can be meaningfully discerned and separated from communicative content for the purposes of mandating disclosure, even when such advertising occurs in “hybrid speech.” The second assumption is that the hidden promotional aspects …
Fixing Copyright In Characters: Literary Perspectives On A Legal Problem, Zahr K. Said
Fixing Copyright In Characters: Literary Perspectives On A Legal Problem, Zahr K. Said
Articles
This Article argues for the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of copyright’s internal inconsistencies. Character jurisprudence under copyright law misaligns with cultural and literary conceptions of character. Intellectual property law has taken insufficient account of important discrepancies among legal, cultural, and literary theories of character. Literature helps articulate what is at work in the doctrinal tensions in copyright’s character jurisprudence over which kind of character, if any, to protect independently, and how much of it, if any, to protect separately from the text.
At the heart of the doctrinal confusion over the proper scope of protection for …
Only Part Of The Picture: A Response To Professor Tushnet's Worth A Thousand Words, Zahr Kassim Said
Only Part Of The Picture: A Response To Professor Tushnet's Worth A Thousand Words, Zahr Kassim Said
Articles
Professor Rebecca Tushnet’s recent article Worth a Thousand Words: The Image of Copyright elucidates a number of difficulties in copyright that flow from judicial failures to treat images consistently and rigorously. She argues that courts both assess copyrightability and evaluate potential infringement in ways that rely on a naïve understanding of the way artists create, and indeed, the way viewers receive works of art. The problem is particularly pronounced with respect to what Tushnet calls non-textual works because copyright law’s default to textuality means that the tools and methods that judges use misalign with the objects of their examination.
In …
Bankrupting Trademarks, Xuan-Thao Nguyen
Bankrupting Trademarks, Xuan-Thao Nguyen
Articles
The explosive growth of technology in the last two decades has vastly expanded intellectual property jurisprudence and elevated intellectual property to a heightened status in the marketplace. Indeed, a company's intellectual property assets may now be its most valuable corporate assets. Moreover, the property value of some trademarks is significantly greater than that of the trademark owner's physical assets.
The term “intellectual property” is commonly understood to include patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks. Yet a paradigm has been constructed and enforced over the last fifteen years wherein only patents, trade secrets, and copyrights are included. The paradigm specifically excludes …