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How The Supreme Court Ignored The Lesson Of Zeran And Screwed Up Copyright Law On The Internet, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

This short essay, prepared for a retrospective organized by Eric Goldman and Jeff Kosseff on the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Zeran v. AOL, argues that the Supreme Court failed to learn the lesson of that foundational case, with adverse consequences for copyright law on the internet.

The Uneasy Case For Patent Federalism, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Nationwide uniformity is often considered an essential feature of the patent system, necessary to fulfill that system’s disclosure and incentive purposes. In the last few years, however, more than half the states have enacted laws that seek to disrupt this uniformity by making it harder for patent holders to enforce their patents. There is an easy case to be made against giving states greater authority over the patent system: doing so would threaten to disrupt the system’s balance between innovation incentives and a robust public domain and would permit rent seeking by states that disproportionately produce or consume innovation.

There …