Law Commons^™

Equitable Ecosystem: A Two-Pronged Approach To Equity In Artificial Intelligence, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Amani Carter, Govind Nagubandi

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Lawmakers, technologists, and thought leaders are facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build equity into the digital infrastructure that will power our lives; we argue for a two-pronged approach to seize that opportunity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to radically transform our world, but we are already seeing evidence that theoretical concerns about potential bias are now being borne out in the market. To change this trajectory and ensure that development teams are focused explicitly on creating equitable AI, we argue that we need to shift the flow of investment dollars. Venture Capital (VC) firms have an outsized impact in determining …

Navigating The Identity Thicket: Trademark's Lost Theory Of Personality, The Right Of Publicity, And Preemption, Jennifer E. Rothman

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Both trademark and unfair competition laws and state right of publicity laws protect against unauthorized uses of a person’s identity. Increasingly, however, these rights are working at odds with one another, and can point in different directions with regard to who controls a person’s name, likeness, and broader indicia of identity. This creates what I call an "identity thicket" of overlapping and conflicting rights over a person’s identity. Current jurisprudence provides little to no guidance on the most basic questions surrounding this thicket, such as what right to use a person’s identity, if any, flows from the transfer of marks …

Intellectual Property As A Determinant Of Health, Ana Santos Rutschman

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Public health literature has long recognized the existence of determinants of health, a set of socio-economic conditions that affect health risks and health outcomes across the world. The World Health Organization defines these determinants as “forces and systems” consisting of “factors combin[ing] together to affect the health of individuals and communities.” Frameworks relying on determinants of health have been widely adopted by countries in the global South and North alike, as well as international institutional players, several of which are direct or indirect players in transnational intellectual property (IP) policymaking. Issues raised by the implementation of IP policies, however, are …

The Intellectual Property Of Covid-19, Ana Santos Rutschman

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The response to COVID-19 is indissolubly tied to intellectual property. In an increasingly globalized world in which infectious disease pathogens travel faster and wider than before, the development of vaccines, treatments and other forms of medical technology has become an integral part of public health preparedness and response frameworks. The development of these technologies, and to a certain extent the allocation and distribution of resulting outputs, is informed by intellectual property regimes. These regimes influence the commitment of R&D resources, shape scientific collaborations and, in some cases, may condition the widespread availability of emerging technologies. As seen throughout this chapter, …

The Law Of Employee Data: Privacy, Property, Governance, Matthew T. Bodie

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The availability of data related to the employment relationship has ballooned into an unruly mass of personal characteristics, performance metrics, biometric recordings, and creative output. The law governing this collection of information has been awkwardly split between privacy regulations and intellectual property rights, with employees generally losing on both ends. This Article rejects a binary approach that either carves out private spaces ineffectually or renders data into isolated pieces of ownership. Instead, the law should implement a hybrid system that provides workers with continuing input and control without blocking efforts at joint production. In addition, employers should have fiduciary responsibilities …

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

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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 …

Vaccines And Ip Preparedness In The Coronavirus Outbreak, Ana Santos Rutschman

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The COVID-19 pandemic has shed renewed light on the importance of research and development (R&D) on biopharmaceutical products needed to prevent or lessen the burden posed by outbreaks of infectious diseases. Among these, the need for new vaccines has become of paramount importance. While a race to develop different types of vaccines unfolds at unusual speed, there are still significant shortcomings in the ecosystem that leads to the production and dissemination of vaccines targeting infectious diseases like COVID-19.

The Intellectual Property Of Vaccines: Takeaways From Recent Infectious Disease Outbreaks, Ana Santos Rutschman

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This Essay examines the ways in which intellectual property regimes influence incentives for the development of new vaccines for infectious diseases. Charting the tension between market forces and public health imperatives, the Essay considers an emerging solution to the long-standing problem of insufficient incentives for vaccine research and development: the rise of public-private partnerships in the health space. The Essay provides a short case study on CEPI, a large-scale public-private partnership dedicated exclusively to funding research on vaccines for infectious diseases. In exploring how the interaction between intellectual property rules and practices affect vaccine innovation, the Essay offers illustrations from …

The Uncopyrightability Of Edicts Of Government, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell

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This amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court appeal of Georgia, et al., v. Public.Resource.Org.,explores the interplay of copyright law and the edicts of government doctrine. The “edicts of government” doctrine was first validated by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of nineteenth century cases. Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834); Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); Callaghan v. Meyers, 128 U.S. 617 (1888). While the doctrine has never been directly recognized in the express wording of the copyright statute, it is nevertheless firmly rooted in foundational copyright principles that are …

The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman

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The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.

The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores …

From Venetian Glass To Contemporary Intellectual Property: Revisiting Tailored Patent Regimes (Book Review), Ana Santos Rutschman

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This piece reviews Stefania Fusco's “Murano Glass Vase" and "Lessons from the Past." In Murano Glass Vase, Fusco recounts the history of the glassmaking industry in Venice, framing it as the natural experiment from which the patent system sprang into the world. Fusco emphasizes the mix of exclusionary rights and trade secrecy that formed the backbone of Venetian innovation policy against the backdrop of a heavily regulated and protectionist economy. In “Lessons from the Past,” Fusco draws on original research performed at the Venetian State Archives to further the Murano narrative by looking at how the Venetian government fueled an …

In The Shadow Of The Law: The Role Of Custom In Intellectual Property, Jennifer E. Rothman

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Custom, including industry practices and social norms, has a tremendous influence on intellectual property (“IP”) law, from affecting what happens outside of the courts in the trenches of the creative, technology, and science-based industries, to influencing how courts analyze infringement and defenses in IP cases. For decades, many scholars overlooked or dismissed the impact of custom on IP law in large part because of a belief that the dominant statutory frameworks that govern IP left little room for custom to play a role. In the last ten years, however, the landscape has shifted and more attention has been given to …

Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.

IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …

Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo

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One of the primary theoretical justifications for copyright is the role that creative works play in helping develop an individual’s sense of personhood and self-actualization. Typically ascribed to the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, personhood-based theories of copyright serve as the foundation for the moral rights prominent in European copyright law and mandated by the leading intellectual property treaty, which give authors inalienable control over aspects of their works after they have been created. The conventional wisdom about the relationship between personhood and copyright suffers from two fatal flaws that have gone largely unappreciated. First, in …

The Genius Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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Among Richard Epstein’s influential contributions to legal scholarship over the years is his writing on common law intellectual property. In it, we see Epstein’s attempt to meld the innate logic of the common law’s conceptual structure with the realities of the modern information economy. Common law intellectual property refers to different judge made causes of action that create forms of exclusive rights and privileges in intangibles, interferences with which are then rendered enforceable through private liability. In this Essay, I examine Epstein’s writing on two such doctrines: “hot news misappropriation” and “cyber-trespass”, which embraces several important ideas that modern discussions …

The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.

This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …

Innovation And Tradition: A Survey Of Intellectual Property And Technology Legal Clinics, Cynthia L. Dahl, Victoria F. Phillips

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For artists, nonprofits, community organizations and small-business clients of limited means, securing intellectual property rights and getting counseling involving patent, copyright and trademark law are critical to their success and growth. These clients need expert IP and technology legal assistance, but very often cannot afford services in the legal marketplace. In addition, legal services and state bar pro bono programs have generally been ill-equipped to assist in these more specialized areas. An expanding community of IP and Technology clinics has emerged across the country to meet these needs. But while law review articles have described and examined other sectors of …

The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …

Antitrust And The Design Of Production, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Both economics and antitrust policy have traditionally distinguished “production” from “distribution.” The former is concerned with how products are designed and built, the latter with how they are placed into the hands of consumers. Nothing in the language of the antitrust laws suggests much concern with production as such. Although courts do not view it that way, even per se unlawful naked price fixing among rivals is a restraint on distribution rather than production. Naked price fixing assumes a product that has already been designed and built, and the important cartel decision is what should be each firm’s output, or …

Brexit And Ip: The Great Unraveling?, Graeme Dinwoodie, Rochelle Dreyfuss

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In theory, exit from Brexit will free the United Kingdom from the constraints and burdens of EU membership. It will transfer sovereignty back to the people from the technocratic rule of Brussels; replace the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice with the adjudicative power of national courts; and allow the UK to tailor its market regulation in the particular exigencies of the UK economy. Whether, as a general matter, the restoration of a classic Westphalian state enhances value either nationally or globally is an issue we leave to others to debate.We ask a different question: we explore how well the …

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

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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 …

Bruised Soul Of The Artist: A Tribute To Sheldon W. Halpern, Anita L. Allen

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In an unusual case, Scottish-born painter Peter Doig was accused of wrongfully denying the authenticity of a painting he insisted he did not paint, to the financial detriment of the work’s owner. Doig won the case against him, which commenced in 2013 and continued for three years. United States District Judge Gary Feinerman ultimately ruled that the evidence presented in a week-long trial proved “conclusively” that Doig did not paint the plaintiff owner’s painting. The case raised concerns about whether a living artist should ever be required by law to authenticate a work of art ascribed to him or her …

Taking Patents, Gregory Dolin, Irina D. Manta

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The America Invents Act (AIA) was widely hailed as a remedy to the excessive number of patents that the Patent & Trademark Office issued, and especially ones that would later turn out to be invalid. In its efforts to eradicate “patent trolls” and fend off other ills, however, the AIA introduced serious constitutional problems that this Article brings to the fore. We argue that the AIA’s new “second-look” mechanisms in the form of Inter Partes Review (IPR) and Covered Business Method Review (CBMR) have greatly altered the scope of vested patent rights by modifying the boundaries of existing patents. The …

The Other Side Of Garcia:The Right Of Publicity And Copyright Preemption, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This essay is adapted from a talk that I gave on October 2, 2015 at Columbia Law School’s annual Kernochan Center Symposium. The all-day conference focused on Copyright Outside the Box. The essay considers the aftermath of Garcia v. Google, Inc., and the Ninth Circuit’s suggestion in that case that Garcia might have a right of publicity claim against the filmmakers, even though her copyright claim failed.

The essay provides a partial update of my prior work, Copyright Preemption and the Right of Publicity, 36 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 199 (2002), and suggests that despite numerous cases over …

Steps Towards An Alignment Of Intellectual Property In South-South Exchanges: A Return To Trips, Ana Santos Rutschman

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Some of the most instrumental players in shaping the course of intellectual property policies in the South are the so-called BRIC countries. The acronym BRIC originally encompassed Brazil, Russia, India and China. In 2011, South Africa formally joined the BRIC countries, which are now referred to either by the original acronym or by BRICS. While categorizations like BRICS attract a fair amount of criticism, with questions surrounding the criteria used to aggregate disparate economies, the concept of emerging economies in the South seeking to advance similar development agendas has become accepted currency in multiple fields, from institutional cooperation to financial …

Steps Towards And Alignment Of Intellectual Property In South-South Exchanges: A Return To Trips, Ana Santos Rutschman

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Some of the most instrumental players in shaping the course of intellectual property policies in the South are the so-called BRIC countries. The acronym BRIC originally encompassed Brazil, Russia, India and China. In 2011, South Africa formally joined the BRIC countries, which are now referred to either by the original acronym or by BRICS. While categorizations like BRICS attract a fair amount of criticism, with questions surrounding the criteria used to aggregate disparate economies, the concept of emerging economies in the South seeking to advance similar development agendas has become accepted currency in multiple fields, from institutional cooperation to financial …

Commercial Speech, Commercial Use, And The Intellectual Property Quagmire, Jennifer E. Rothman

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The commercial speech doctrine in First Amendment jurisprudence has frequently been criticized and is recognized as a highly contested, problematic and shifting landscape. Despite the compelling critique within constitutional law scholarship more broadly, Intellectual Property (“IP”) law has not only embraced the differential treatment of commercial speech, but has done so in ways that disfavor a much broader swath of speech than traditional commercial speech doctrine allows. One of the challenges for courts, litigants, and scholars alike is that the term “commercial” is used to mean multiple things, even within the same body of IP law. In this Article, I …

Public Good Economics And Standard Essential Patents, Christopher S. Yoo

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Standard essential patents have emerged as a major focus in both the public policy and academic arenas. The primary concern is that once a patented technology has been incorporated into a standard, the standard can effectively insulate it from competition from substitute technologies. To guard against the appropriation of quasi-rents that are the product of the standard setting process rather than the innovation itself, standard setting organizations (SSOs) require patentholders to disclose their relevant intellectual property before the standard has been adopted and to commit to license those rights on terms that are fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND).

To date …

Copyright’S Private Ordering And The 'Next Great Copyright Act', Jennifer E. Rothman

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Private ordering plays a significant role in the application of intellectual property laws, especially in the context of copyright law. In this Article, I highlight some of the dominant modes of private ordering and consider what formal copyright law should do, if anything, to engage with private ordering in the copyright space. I conclude that there is not one single approach that copyright law should take with regard to private ordering, but instead several different approaches. In some instances, the best option is for the law to get out of the way and simply continue to provide room for various …

Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo

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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 …