Digital Commons Network^™

Can Dna Be Speech?, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig

Gender Biases In Cyberspace: A Two-Stage Model For A Feminist Way Forward, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Amy Mittelman

Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid Professor of Law

Increasingly, there has been a focus on creating democratic standards and procedures in order to best facilitate open exchange of information and communication online—a goal that fits neatly within the feminist aim to democratize content creation and community. Collaborative websites, such as blogs, social networks, and, as focused on in this Article, Wikipedia, represent both a Cyberspace community entirely outside the strictures of the traditional (intellectual) proprietary paradigm and one that professes to truly embody the philosophy of a completely open, free, and democratic resource for all. In theory, collaborative websites are the solution that social activists, Intellectual Property opponents …

Nsfw: An Empirical Study Of Scandalous Trademarks, Megan M. Carpenter

Megan M Carpenter

This project is an empirical analysis of trademarks that have received rejections based on the judgment that they are “scandalous." It is the first of its kind. The Lanham Act bars registration for trademarks that are “scandalous” and “immoral.” While much has been written on the morality provisions in the Lanham Act generally, this piece is the first scholarly project that engages an empirical analysis of 2(a) rejections based on scandalousness; it contains a look behind the scenes at how the morality provisions are applied throughout the trademark registration process. We study which marks are being rejected, what evidence is …

Weeds, Seeds, & Deeds Redux: Natural And Legal Evolution In The U.S. Seed Wars, Rebecca Stewart

Rebecca K Stewart

Ever since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began issuing utility patents for plants, the United States has sat squarely on the frontlines of what have come to be known as the “seed wars.” In the last two decades, the majority of battles in the U.S. seed wars have been waged in the form of patent infringement lawsuits. Typically these suits are filed by biotechnology corporations such as Monsanto against farmers accused of saving and planting patented seed that self-replicates to produce progeny embodying—and thus infringing—the biotech corporations’ patented inventions.

Yet in recent years, the seed wars have begun to …

The Fashion Lottery: Cooperative Innovation In Stochastic Markets, Jonathan Barnett, Gilles Grolleau, Sana El Harbi

Jonathan M Barnett

The fashion market is an anomaly: innovation is vigorous but original producers are substantially unprotected against imitation, which proliferates under an incomplete property regime consisting of strong trademark protections and weak design protections. We account for this anomaly through a “cooperative innovation” model where producers prefer an incomplete property regime that permits some imitation to alternative regimes that permit no imitation or all imitation, independent of budget constraints. A property regime that permits positive but limited levels of imitation operates as a form of group insurance that alleviates the risk of recoupment failure in a market characterized by demand uncertainty, …

Social Innovation, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

This Article provides the first legal examination of the immensely valuable but underappreciated phenomenon of social innovation. Innovations such as cognitive behavioral therapy, microfinance, and strategies to reduce hospital-based infections greatly enhance social welfare yet operate completely outside of the patent system, the primary legal mechanism for promoting innovation. This Article draws on empirical evidence to elucidate this significant kind of innovation and explore its divergence from the classic model of technological innovation championed by the patent system. In so doing, it illustrates how patent law exhibits a rather crabbed, particularistic conception of innovation. Among other characteristics, innovation in the …

Patents And The University, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

This Article advances two novel claims about the internalization of academic science within patent law and the concomitant evolution of “academic exceptionalism.” Historically, relations between patent law and the university were characterized by mutual exclusion, based in part on normative conflicts between academia and exclusive rights. These normative distinctions informed “academic exceptionalism”—the notion that the patent system should exclude the fruits of academic science or treat academic entities differently than other actors—in patent doctrine. As universities began to embrace patents, however, academic science has become internalized within the traditional commercial narrative of patent protection. Contemporary courts frequently invoke universities’ commercial …

Emerging Technologies And Dwindling Speech, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig

Decoding First Amendment Coverage Of Computer Source Code In The Age Of Youtube, Facebook And The Arab Spring, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig