Technology and Innovation Commons^™

Converting Intellectual Assets Into Property, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

The mouse and graphic interface were first commercialized on Macintosh computers. Yet, Steve Jobs is said to have derived both from the Alto computer developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. While Jobs became a billionaire, "Xerox completely failed to get into the personal computer business, missing one of the biggest business opportunities in history."

Preferring to be more akin to Apple than to Xerox, firms are increasingly mindful that their most valuable assets are apt to be ideas and information instead of land, buildings and inventory. Not capable of being fenced in or locked up, intangible assets can be …

Access To Justice For The Self-Represented Litigant: An Interdisciplinary Investigation By Designers And Lawyers (With P. Hannaford), Ronald W. Staudt

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Adequacy Of The 1995 Antitrust Guidelines For The Licensing Of Intellectual Property In Complex High Tech Markets, Clovia Hamilton

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

In 1995, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission adopted new guidelines for those wishing to license intellectual property rights without violating antitrust laws. Designed to provide clarity, these guidelines instead breed confusion because they misunderstand the nature of intellectual property markets and provide insufficient guidance in the most difficult areas. Section I of this article will discuss the basic provisions of the guidelines, especially their treatment of "innovation markets." It argues that government enforcers should focus primarily on activity that creates entry barriers. Understanding the use and misuse of licensing is the key to analyzing barriers in …

Innovations In Competitive Manufacturing, Paul Swamidass

Paul Swamidass

Competitive manufacturing in the US was made possible by the progress made in a number of areas. For example, progress in competitive manufacturing is attributable to advances in the strategic use if manufacturing, cellular manufacturing, lean manufacturing, flexible automation, total quality management, supply chain management, design for manufacturing, mass customization, improved costing, and so on.

Pressured by competition, US manufacturers began the journey to competitive manufacturing in the late seventies; their success brought revolutionary changes to US manufacturing.

The book is arranged in 13 different chapters, each covering a major subject within manufacturing management. Each chapter consists of one or …

Proposal For A Centralized And Integrated Registry For Security Interests In Intellectual Property, William J. Murphy

Law Faculty Scholarship

As the world economy enters the twenty-first century, job and wealth creation is increasingly based on innovation and creativity that, in turn, can give rise to important intellectual property rights. For many companies and individuals these intellectual property rights may represent their most valuable assets, or in some cases, their only valuable assets. As a result, intellectual property rights increasingly play a critical the role in financing.

Unlocking the job and wealth creating potential of intellectual property assets requires putting these assets into use, and that often requires a capital investment. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs and innovators lack the capital necessary …

Reconsidering Estoppel: Patent Administration And The Failure Of Festo, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

Last Term, in Festo Corporation v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabashuki Co., the United States Supreme Court missed perhaps the most important opportunity for patent law reform in two decades. At the core of the failure to grasp the implications of "prosecution history estoppel" - a judicially-crafted principle limiting the enforceable scope of patents based on acts occurring during their application process - is the heretofore universal (but ultimately unsupportable) view of the doctrine as an arbitrary ex post limitation on patent scope. This Article demonstrates the serious flaws in this traditionalist approach, and develops a new theory of prosecution history …

Towards An Integrated Theory Of Intellectual Property, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses a curious gap in the theory of intellectual property. One of the central dogmas in both the legal and economic literatures is that patents, copyrights and trademarks constitute separate forms of protection, each serving different purposes and designed to operate independently of the others. By challenging this dogma, however, this Article shows that certain combinations of intellectual property protection give rise to important synergies. When a patentee can develop brand loyalty among its customers, the existence of trademark protection allows her to extend its protection even after her patent expires, and thereby earn higher profits than would …