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Full-Text Articles in Law
Inventing Norms, William Hubbard
Inventing Norms, William Hubbard
All Faculty Scholarship
Patent law strives to promote the progress of technology by encouraging invention. Traditionally, scholars contend that patent law achieves this goal by creating financial incentives to invent in the form of exclusive rights to new technology. This traditional view of invention, however, fails to recognize that inventors are motivated by more than money. Like most people, inventors are also motivated by social norms, that is, shared normative beliefs favoring certain actions while disfavoring others. This Article argues that many Americans embrace social norms that favor and encourage successful invention. Because of these "inventing norms" inventors enjoy enhanced personal satisfaction and …
Atypical Inventions, Sean B. Seymore
Atypical Inventions, Sean B. Seymore
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Patent law is constantly evolving to accommodate advances in science and technology. But, for a variety of reasons, some aspects of patent doctrine have not evolved over time leading to a growing disconnect between the patent system and certain technical communities. Particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of this disconnect are "atypical" inventions, which this Article definesas those in which either (1) a technical aspect of the invention or the inventive process does not conform to an established legal standard in patent law or (2) the technical underpinnings of the invention depart from well-established scientific paradigms. An example of the …
Rethinking Novelty In Patent Law, Sean B. Seymore
Rethinking Novelty In Patent Law, Sean B. Seymore
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The novelty requirement seeks to ensure that a patent will not issue if the public already possesses the invention. Although gauging possession is usually straightforward for simple inventions, it can be difficult for those in complex fields like biotechnology, chemistry, and pharmaceuticals. For example, if a drug company seeks to patent a promising molecule that was disclosed but never physically made in the prior art, the key possession question is whether a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) could have made it at the time of the prior disclosure. Put differently, could the PHOSITA rely on then-existing knowledge …
Life After Bilski, Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman, R. Polk Wagner
Life After Bilski, Mark A. Lemley, Michael Risch, Ted Sichelman, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court declined calls to categorically exclude business methods—or any technology—from the patent law. It also rejected as the sole test of subject matter eligibility the Federal Circuit’s deeply-flawed machine-or-transformation test, under which no process is patentable unless it is tied to a particular machine or transforms an article to another state or thing. Subsequent developments threaten to undo that holding, however. Relying on the Court’s description of the Federal Circuit test as a “useful and important clue,” the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent litigants, and district courts have all continued to rely on …
Negativing Invention, Jacob S. Sherkow
Negativing Invention, Jacob S. Sherkow
Articles & Chapters
Since 1952, the patent statute has forbidden courts from discriminating against, or “negativing,” inventions according to how they were made, be it “long toil and experimentation” or a “flash of genius.” Now, in addressing whether an invention is “obvious,” courts must only examine whether the invention was obvious according to the arts pertinent to that invention — the “analogous” rather than “nonanalogous” arts. This article shows that this dichotomy has actually promoted method-of-invention discrimination in patent law because the subjectivity of the analogous art inquiry has increasingly “analogized” wide fields of prior art as technology has progressed. This, in turn, …
Beyond Invention: Patent As Knowledge Law, Michael J. Madison
Beyond Invention: Patent As Knowledge Law, Michael J. Madison
Articles
The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Bilski v. Kappos, concerning the legal standard for determining patentable subject matter under the American Patent Act, is used as a starting point for a brief review of historical, philosophical, and cultural influences on subject matter questions in both patent and copyright law. The article suggests that patent and copyright law jurisprudence was constructed initially by the Court with explicit attention to the relationship between these forms of intellectual property law and the roles of knowledge in society. Over time, explicit attention to that relationship has largely disappeared from …