Business Commons^™

Did The America Invents Act Change University Technology Transfer?, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

University technology transfer offices (TTOs) are the gatekeepers to groundbreaking innovations sparked in research laboratories around the U.S. With a business model reliant on patenting and licensing out for commercialization, TTOs were positioned for upheaval when the America Invents Act (AIA) transformed U.S. patent law in 2011. Now almost ten years later, this article examines the AIA’s actual effects on this patent-centric industry. It focuses on the five key areas of most interest to TTOs: i) first to file priority; ii) broadening of the universe of prior art; iii) carve-out to the prior commercial use defense; iv) micro-entity fees; and …

Solving Ethical Puzzles To Unlock University Technology Transfer Client Work For An Intellectual Property Legal Clinic, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property (IP) and technology legal clinics are experiencing an unprecedented surge in popularity. Before 2000 there were only five such clinics, but by 2016 there were seventy-four, with fifty added since 2010 alone. As law schools are approving new IP clinics and as practitioners are developing syllabi, there is an increasing need to share knowledge about models that work and how to avoid pitfalls.

One potentially fertile – but traditionally underutilized -- source of client work for an IP and technology clinic is the university technology transfer office (“TTO”), the department that protects, markets, and licenses all university intellectual …

The Pragmatic Incrementalism Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

‘Common law intellectual property’ refers to a set of judge-made legal regimes that create exclusionary entitlements in different kinds of intangibles. Principally the creation of courts, many of these regimes are older than their statutory counterparts and continue to co-exist with them. Surprisingly though, intellectual property scholarship has paid scant attention to the nuanced law-making mechanisms and techniques that these regimes employ to navigate through several of intellectual property law’s substantive and structural problems. Common law intellectual property regimes employ a process of rule development that this Article calls ‘pragmatic incrementalism’. It involves the use of pragmatic and minimalist techniques …