Law Commons^™

Bilski And The Information Age A Decade Later, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

In the years from State Street in 1999 to Alice in 2014, legal scholars vigorously debated whether patents should be used to incentivize the invention of business methods. That attention has waned just as economists have produced important new research on the topic, and just as artificial intelligence and cloud computing are changing the nature of business method innovation. This chapter rejoins the debate and concludes that the case for patent protection of business methods is weaker now than it was a decade ago.

A Compulsory Solution To The Machine Problem, Cole G. Merritt

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already disrupting and will likely continue to disrupt many industries. Despite the role AI already plays, AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful. Ultimately, these systems may become a powerful tool that can lead to the discovery of important inventions or significantly reduce the time required to discover these inventions. Even now, AI systems are independently inventing. However, the resulting AI-generated inventions are unable to receive patent protection under current US patent law. This unpatentability may lead to inefficient results and ineffectively serves the goals of patent law.

To embrace the development and power of AI, Congress …

Eviscerating Patent Scope, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

The scope of patent claims directed to inventions in the field of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology has been stumped by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s recent jurisprudence on 35 U.S.C. § 112. Specifically, the application of a heightened test for enablement of claims to a genus of compounds with functional limitations or a genus of therapeutic antibodies, coupled with an increasingly broader application of the written description doctrine, has resulted in considerable uncertainty in the biopharmaceutical industry. The Federal Circuit’s shift in interpreting 35 U.S.C. § 112 contravenes the statute and Supreme Court precedent by splitting the singular …

Intellectual Property, Independent Creation, And The Lockean Commons, Mala Chatterjee

Faculty Scholarship

Copyrights and patents are differently structured intellectual property rights in different kinds of entities. Nonetheless, they are widely regarded by U.S. scholars as having the same theoretical underpinnings. Though scholars have sought to connect philosophical theories of property to intellectual property, with a particular interest in the labor theory of John Locke, these explorations have not sufficiently probed copyrights’ and patents’ doctrinal differences or their philosophical implications for the theories explored. This Article argues that a defining difference between copyrights and patents has normative significance for the framework of Lockean property theory: namely, that copyright law treats independent creation as …