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Full-Text Articles in Law
How Patents Became Politics, Steven Wilf
How Patents Became Politics, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
Political mobilization in the digital age often coalesces around opposition to the far-reaching protection of intellectual property. Both copyright and patent have materialized as the centerpiece of major political and legal debates that take a variety of forms, including the European pirate parties, NGOs such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States, and the call for Open Source software. The commonplace narrative is that self-interested stakeholders over the past century successfully fashioned an ever-expanding intellectual property system, and that resistance to such legal control of knowledge only emerged in our times. By contrast, this article recovers a little-known …
Under A Nifty Light: Trademark Considerations For The New Digital World, Willajeane Mclean
Under A Nifty Light: Trademark Considerations For The New Digital World, Willajeane Mclean
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Muzzling Antitrust: Information Products, Innovation And Free Speech, Hillary Greene
Muzzling Antitrust: Information Products, Innovation And Free Speech, Hillary Greene
Faculty Articles and Papers
How well does the American legal system balance the diverse values society espouses? Courts must often navigate values that are not consistent, commensurate, or subject to ordinal ranking. This article examines the confluence of incommensurate values within the important context of antitrust challenges to information product redesigns (e.g., Google, Nielsen). The information economy has given rise to the emergence of powerful firms in the business of information products. Some of these firms have had product redesigns challenged as anticompetitive. This article examines two defenses to these challenges. First, the products constitute protected speech and should be immunized entirely from antitrust …
Rebalancing Trips, Molly Land
Rebalancing Trips, Molly Land
Faculty Articles and Papers
Application of the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution procedures to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) has provoked a variety of reactions over time. Initially perceived as a significant loss for developing countries, more recent responses maintain that these fears were unfounded. This Article argues that the availability of adjudication through the WTO has indeed had significant consequences for the policy space of developing countries — just not in the manner initially imagined. One of the most important yet underappreciated consequences of the decision to link trade and intellectual property has been the conflation of trade and …
The Once And Future Networked Self, Steven Wilf
The Once And Future Networked Self, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Copyright And Social Movements In Late Nineteenth-Century America, Steven Wilf
Copyright And Social Movements In Late Nineteenth-Century America, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests as a mechanism to establish claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’ ever-expanding proprietary control of knowledge and establishing a more public regarding copyright system. This Article examines one of the most notable intellectual property political movements, the emergence of late nineteenth-century agitation to provide copyright protection for foreign authors as a social movement. It places this political and legal activism within the larger framework of Progressive Era reform. During this …
Non-Per Se Treatment Of Buyer Price-Fixing In Intellectual Property Settings, Hillary Greene
Non-Per Se Treatment Of Buyer Price-Fixing In Intellectual Property Settings, Hillary Greene
Faculty Articles and Papers
The ability of intellectual property owners to earn monopoly rents and the inability of horizontal competitors to price fix legally are two propositions that are often taken as givens. This article challenges the wholesale adoption of either proposition within the context of buyer price-fixing in intellectual property markets. More specifically, it examines antitrust law’s role in protecting patent holders’ rents through its condemnation of otherwise ostensibly efficient buyer price fixing. Using basic economic analysis, this article refines the legal standards applicable at this point of intersection between antitrust and patent law. In particular, the author recommends the limited abandonment of …
The Making Of The Post-War Paradigm In American Intellectual Property Law, Steven Wilf
The Making Of The Post-War Paradigm In American Intellectual Property Law, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
During the New Deal period, intellectual property underwent a transformation. Copyright was recast from literary property to industrial property; trademark shifted from a common law tort of palming off to a regulatory regime for a mass consumer economy, and patent law was rethought to accommodate corporate invention. This essay begins by examining the advantages of looking at intellectual property as deeply situated in New Deal debates over political economy, and calls for a new history of intellectual property very different from conventional narratives moored in the introduction of new technologies. More broadly, it suggests that examining foundational past policy debates, …
Policy Implications Of Weak Patent Rights, Hillary Greene, James J. Anton, Dennis A. Yao
Policy Implications Of Weak Patent Rights, Hillary Greene, James J. Anton, Dennis A. Yao
Faculty Articles and Papers
Patents vary substantially in the degree of protection provided against unauthorized imitation. In this chapter we explore a range of work addressing the economic and policy implications of "weak" patents--patents that have a significant probability of being overturned or being circumvented relatively easily---on innovation and disclosure incentives, antitrust policy, and organizational incentives and entrepreneurial activity.
Weak patents cause firms to rely more heavily on secrecy. Thus, the competitive environment is characterized by private information about the extent of the innovator's know-how. In such an environment weak patents increase the likelihood of imitation and infringement, reduce the amount of knowledge publicly …
Competition Perspectives On Patent Law Substance And Procedure: An Overview Of The Ftc/Doj Hearings And The Ftc Report, Hillary Greene
Competition Perspectives On Patent Law Substance And Procedure: An Overview Of The Ftc/Doj Hearings And The Ftc Report, Hillary Greene
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Trade Secrets, Property, And Social Relations, Steven Wilf
Trade Secrets, Property, And Social Relations, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Towards An Integrated Theory Of Intellectual Property, Peter Siegelman, Gideon Parchomovsky
Towards An Integrated Theory Of Intellectual Property, Peter Siegelman, Gideon Parchomovsky
Faculty Articles and Papers
In recent years, the importance of intellectual property law both as an academic discipline and as a real world phenomenon has risen meteorically. Oddly, however, there exists a striking misfit between the academic theory of intellectual property and its use in the real world. Economists and legal scholars tend to treat each of the constituent fields of intellectual property as discrete and insular. Worse yet, the same insularity has pervaded the United States Supreme Court's intellectual property jurisprudence. Most recently, in TrafFix Devices v. Marketing Displays, Justice Kennedy opined that "[trademark law] does not exist to reward manufacturers for their …
Afterword: The Role Of The Competition Community In The Patent Law Discourse, Hillary Greene
Afterword: The Role Of The Competition Community In The Patent Law Discourse, Hillary Greene
Faculty Articles and Papers
The Federal Circuit is the most visible point of the intersection between competition and patent law. When a single case contains both competition and patent issues, precedents of that court, including those pertaining to governing legal burdens or presumptions, will be critical. It is worth considering whether and how actual or assumed consumer welfare trade-offs are reflected in those decisions. Additionally, the basic decision to confer patents, and the attendant choices regarding their breadth, scope, and other aspects, also reflect social value judgments that directly implicate competition. The competition community can help both to focus attention upon and to illuminate …
What Is Property's Fourth Estate - Cultural Property And The Fiduciary Ideal, Steven Wilf
What Is Property's Fourth Estate - Cultural Property And The Fiduciary Ideal, Steven Wilf
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Who Authors Trademarks, Steven Wilf
Who's Afraid Of Functional Claims - Reforming The Patent Law's 112, 6 Jurisprudence, Mark Weston Janis
Who's Afraid Of Functional Claims - Reforming The Patent Law's 112, 6 Jurisprudence, Mark Weston Janis
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
Public Performance Right In Recordings: How To Alter The Copyright System Without Improving It, Lewis Kurlantzick
Public Performance Right In Recordings: How To Alter The Copyright System Without Improving It, Lewis Kurlantzick
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.
The Constitutionality Of State Law Protection Of Sound Recordings, Lewis Kurlantzick
The Constitutionality Of State Law Protection Of Sound Recordings, Lewis Kurlantzick
Faculty Articles and Papers
No abstract provided.