Law Commons^™

Trust: A Model For Disclosure In Patent Law, Ari Ezra Waldman

Indiana Law Journal

How to draw the line between public and private is a foundational, first-principles question of privacy law, but the answer has implications for intellectual property, as well. This project is one in a series of papers about first-person disclosures of information in the privacy and intellectual property law contexts, and it defines the boundary between public and nonpublic information through the lens of social science —namely, principles of trust.

Patent law’s public use bar confronts the question of whether legal protection should extend to information previously disclosed to a small group of people. I present evidence that shows that current …

Innovation Heuristics: Experiments On Sequential Creativity In Intellectual Property, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Jon Sprigman

Indiana Law Journal

All creativity and innovation build on existing ideas. Authors and inventors copy, adapt, improve, interpret, and refine the ideas that have come before them. The central task of intellectual property (IP) law is regulating this sequential innovation to ensure that initial creators and subsequent creators receive the appropriate sets of incentives. Although many scholars have applied the tools of economic analysis to consider whether IP law is successful in encouraging cumulative innovation, that work has rested on a set of untested assumptions about creators’ behavior. This Article reports four novel creativity experiments that begin to test those assumptions. In particular, …

University Ip: The University As Coordinator Of The Team Production Process, Samuel Estreicher, Kristina A. Yost

Indiana Law Journal

This Article focuses on intellectual property (IP) issues in the university setting. Often, universities require faculty who have been hired in whole or in part to invent to assign inventions created within the scope of their employment to the university. In addition, the most effective way to secure compliance with the Bayh-Dole Act, which deals with ownership of inventions involving federally funded research, is for the university to take title to such inventions. Failure to specify who has title can result in title passing to the government. Once the university asserts ownership, it then decides whether to process a patent …