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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert Hovenkamp
The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert Hovenkamp
Herbert Hovenkamp
For a century and a half the Supreme Court has described perceived patent abuses as conduct that reaches "beyond the scope of the patent." That phrase, which evokes an image of boundary lines in real property, has been applied to both government and private activity and has many different meanings. It has been used offensively to conclude that certain patent uses are unlawful because they extend beyond the scope of the patent. It is also used defensively, however, to characterize activities as lawful if they do not extend beyond the patent's scope. In the first half of the twentieth century …
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …
Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Whether antitrust policy should pursue a goal of "general welfare" or "consumer welfare" has been debated for decades. The academic debate is much more varied than the case law, however, which has consistently adopted consumer welfare as a goal, almost never condemning a practice found to produce an actual output reduction or price increase simply because productive efficiency gains accruing to producers exceeded consumer losses.
While some practices such as mergers might produce greater gains in productive efficiency than losses in consumer welfare, identifying such situations would be extraordinarily difficult. First, these efficiencies would have to be "transaction specific," meaning …