Digital Commons Network^™

Third Party Access And Refusal To Deal In European Energy Networks: How Sector Regulation And Competition Law Meet Each Other, Michael Diathesopoulos

Michael Diathesopoulos

In this paper, we will analyse the issue of concurrence between competition and sector rules and the relation between parallel concepts within the two different legal frameworks. We will firstly examine Third Party Access in relation to essential facilities doctrine and refusal of access and we will identify the common points and objectives of these concepts and the extent to which they provide a context to each other’s implementation. Second, we will focus on how Commission uses sector regulation and objectives as a context within the process of implementation of competition law in the energy sector and third, we will …

Slides: Drilling Waste, Blake Scott

Opportunities and Obstacles to Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Natural Gas Development in Uintah Basin (October 14)

Presenter: Blake Scott, Scott Environmental Services, Inc.

24 slides

Innovation And Recovery, John F. Duffy

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Crisis inevitably brings hope for recovery. The recent past has seen a great economic crisis and a crisis in the patent system. Precisely because crisis reveals the flaws in the old, recovery demands the new; it demands innovation. Economic crisis thus makes recovery in the patent system especially urgent because it reveals the degree to which continuing prosperity depends on society's ability to reorganize itself, to change, to innovate. Towards that end, society should reconsider how our patent system makes judgments about invention. More specifically, Professor Duffy will seek to show through this lecture that the change most necessary for …

The Time And Place For "Technology-Shifting" Rights, Max Stul Oppenheimer

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Intellectual property policy requires balance between the goal of motivating innovation and the need to prevent that motivation from stifling further innovation. The constitutional grant of congressional power to motivate innovation by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries is qualified by the requirement that congressional enactments under the Intellectual Property Clause promote progress. The Supreme Court has already recognized a time-shifting exception to the intellectual property rights of innovators and lower courts have recognized a place-shifting exception. It is now the time and place for a general technology-shifting exception …

The Upside Of Intellectual Property's Downside, Christopher A. Cotropia, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Intellectual property law exists because exclusive private rights provide an incentive to innovate. This is the traditional upside of intellectual property: the production of valuable information goods that society would otherwise never see. In turn, too much intellectual property protection is typically viewed as counterproductive, as too much control in the hands of private rightsholders creates more artificial scarcity and imposes more costs on future innovators than the incentive effect warrants. This is the traditional downside of intellectual property: reduced production and impeded innovation. This Article turns the traditional discussion on its head and shows that intellectual property’s putative costs …

Workplace Flexibility: A Norm Of The American Workplace, Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center

Memos and Fact Sheets

A PowerPoint slide-show that outlines the challenges, options, policies, solutions, and innovations associated with Flexible Work Arrangements.

Protecting Innovation In Computer Software, Biotechnology, And Nanotechnology, Dennis S. Karjala

Dennis S Karjala

In the 1970’s, paying virtually no attention to the fundamental distinction between patent and copyright subject matter, Congress decided to protect computer programs as a “literary work” under copyright law. As a result, a work of technology for the first time was consciously placed under the protective umbrella of a statute designed for art, music, and literature. While the vulnerability of computer program code to cheap and easy verbatim copying supplied a policy basis for “anti-copy” protection of code, courts often analogized these congressionally anointed “literary works” to broadly protected novels and plays rather than thinly protected technical specifications and …

Ip Misuse As Foreclosure, Christina Bohannan

Christina Bohannan

In an age of IP expansionism, the doctrine most explicitly concerned with limiting IP overreaching has no defensible basis in IP policy. “Misuse” relates to the IP holder’s use of licenses and other arrangements to obtain rights “beyond the scope” of a statutory IP grant, but the doctrine has not established adequate principles for identifying the practices that should be condemned. The misuse doctrine evolved in patent law and concerned the tying of patented and unpatented goods. Courts held that such tying violated federal patent policy by expanding the statutory monopoly to include a second product not covered by the …

The Tenth Annual A. A. Sommer, Jr. Lecture On Corporate, Securities, & Financial Law, Elisse B. Walter

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Pioneers Versus Improvers: Enabling Optimal Patent Claim Scope, Timothy Chen Saulsbury

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Arising most commonly as a defense to an infringement claim, enablement requires a patent to describe the claimed invention in sufficient detail to permit a person having ordinary skill in the relevant field to replicate and use the invention without needing to engage in "undue experimentation." If a patent claim is not "enabled"--i.e., if a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) who studied the patent cannot make or use the invention without undue experimentation--the claim is invalid and can no longer be asserted. This penalty deters patent applicants from claiming more than they invented and allows others to …

Collaborative Lawyers' Duties To Screen The Appropriateness Of Collaborative Law And Obtain Clients' Informed Consent To Use Collaborative Law, John M. Lande, Forrest Steven Mosten

Faculty Publications

Collaborative Law (CL) is an innovative dispute resolution process that offers significant benefits but also poses significant non-obvious risks. This Article provides a systematic analysis of these possible risks as identified in books written by CL experts, CL practice group websites, social science research, and bar association ethics opinions. In CL, the lawyers and clients sign a "participation agreement" promising to use an interest-based approach to negotiation and fully disclose all relevant information. A key element of CL is the "disqualification agreement" signed by parties (and sometimes by attorneys) which provides that both CL lawyers would be disqualified from representing …

Constructing Commons In The Cultural Environment, Katherine J. Strandburg, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann

Katherine J. Strandburg

This Article sets out a framework for investigating sharing and resource pooling arrangements for information and knowledge-based works. We argue that the approach to commons arrangements in the natural environment pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators provides a template for examining the construction of commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environments in which they are embedded, in relation to information and knowledge resources that they produce and use, and in relation to one another.

An improved understanding …

Utilitarian Information Works - Is Originality The Proper Lens?, Dana Beldiman

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

As the information society advances, vastly increased numbers of utilitarian information works (UIW) are being produced. In general, these works are deemed protected by copyright law, even though the philosophical underpinnings of copyright law clash with the attributes of UIW. This Article examines the cause for the uneasy relationship between UIW and the concept of originality. Part I discusses the role of information and UIW as one of the core wealth-producing assets of the knowledge-based economy. This economy is characterized by a rapid pace of innovation, which in turn, requires unrestricted access to information. Part II examines copyright law as …

Fixing Our Broken Patent System, Jay Dratler

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This short Article digests what the Author see as the most important substantive criticism and proposes specific solutions in the form of the "guts" of a new patent statute. Its statutory proposal tracks the current statute's organization and has numerous annotations explaining what is the same, what is changed and why, and what never-before-codified principles of judge-made law are explicitly codified. Among the proposed statute's fundamental changes are: (1) explicit restrictions on patentable subject matter to avoid patents on bare abstractions; (2) adoption of a first-to-file system requiring worldwide novelty; (3) abolition of the doctrine of constructive reduction to practice …

Equity And Efficiency In Intellectual Property Taxation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

This article examines the federal income tax regime governing intellectual property using normative criteria in evaluating taxes: equity and efficiency. The article first evaluates the current intellectual property tax scheme in terms of horizontal equity, identifying differences in tax treatment of what appear to be similar intellectual property activities. It argues that disparate tax treatments between seemingly similar intellectual property owners signal that flaws may exist in the tax system. The article then assesses the efficiency of the intellectual property tax system, examining numerous tax subsidies for intellectual property and their effectiveness in promoting economic growth. It argues that many …

The Legal Ecology Of Resistance: The Role Of Antibiotic Resistance In Pharmaceutical Innovation, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

Antibiotic effectiveness is a common pool resource that can be prematurely depleted through resistance. Some experts warn that we may face a global ecological collapse in antibiotic effectiveness. Conventional wisdom argues for more intellectual property rights to speed the creation of new antibiotics. Recent theoretical literature suggests that conservation-based approaches may yield superior results. This Article describes a novel typology for organizing these emerging theories, and provides an early empirical test of these models, using proprietary data on the sales of vancomycin, an important hospital antibiotic for the last three decades.

The results challenge the assumptions in several models, and …

Locating Innovation: The Endogeneity Of Technology, Organizational Structure, And Financial Contracting, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

There is much we do not understand about the "location" of innovation: the confluence, for a particular innovation, of the technology associated with the innovation; the innovating firm's size and organizational structure; and the financial contracting that supports the innovation. This Essay suggests that these three indicia are determined simultaneously and discusses the interaction among them through four examples of innovative activity whose location is characterized by tradeoffs between pursuing the activity in an established company, in a smaller, earlier-stage company, or some combination of the two. It first considers the dilemma faced by an established company in deciding whether …

Lessons From The Financial Crisis, Maurice Stucke

Scholarly Works

What lessons can we learn from the financial crisis concerning the issues of systemic risk, firms too big to fail, and the income inequality in the United States today?

In light of the public anger over the financial crisis and bailouts to firms deemed too big to fail, this Essay first addresses the issue of systemic risk posed by mergers generally and those in the financial services industries specifically. The federal government heard concerns in the 1990s about mega-mergers in the financial industry. The Department of Justice, for example, heard concerns that the Citibank-Travelers merger would create an institution too …

Reinventing Usefulness, Michael Risch

Michael Risch

Patent law includes one of this country’s oldest continuous statutory requirements: since 1790, and without variance, inventors are only entitled to patent “new and useful” inventions. While “newness” receives constant attention and debate, usefulness has been largely ignored. Usefulness has transformed into the toothless and misunderstood “utility” doctrine, which requires that patents only have a bare minimum potential for use. This article seeks to reinvent patentable usefulness. It is the first comprehensive look at usefulness and it reasons that a core benefit of the requirement is to aid in the commercialization of inventions. The article then proposes two ways that …

Constructing Commons In The Cultural Environment, Katherine J. Strandburg, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann

Brett Frischmann

This Article sets out a framework for investigating sharing and resource pooling arrangements for information and knowledge-based works. We argue that the approach to commons arrangements in the natural environment pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators provides a template for examining the construction of commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environments in which they are embedded, in relation to information and knowledge resources that they produce and use, and in relation to one another.

An improved understanding …