Law Commons^™

Brief For The Coalition Against Patent Abuse As Amicus Curiae In Support No Party, Charles Duan

Amicus Briefs

Perhaps unexpectedly, a case on the constitutionality of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has major significance to the pressing policy crisis of drug prices in the United States. Erroneously issued patents monopolize medical therapies, making them unaffordable or inaccessible to numerous Americans. The inter partes review proceedings that the Board conducts have repeatedly and successfully overcome such patents, enabling competition and dramatically lowering prices. This Court should ensure the continued viability of the Board and of inter partes review, by preserving the Board’s objectivity and independence from executive branch political influence.

Who's Afraid Of Section 1498? A Case For Government Patent Use In Pandemics And Other National Crisis, Charles Duan, Christopher J. Morten

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

COVID-19 has created pressing and widespread needs for vaccines, medical treatments, PPE, and other medical technologies, needs that may conflict--indeed, have already begun to conflict--with the exclusive rights conferred by United States patents. The U.S. government has a legal mechanism to overcome this conflict: government use of patented technologies at the cost of government paid compensation under 28 U. S.C. § 1498. But while many have recognized the theoretical possibility of government patent use under that statute, there is today conventional wisdom that § 1498 is too exceptional, unpredictable, and dramatic for practical use, to the point that it ought …

Risk Taking And Rights Balancing In Intellectual Property Law, Clark D. Asay

Akron Law Review

Scholars have long worried that risk aversion can have significant negative effects in the marketplace. In the intellectual property law domain, some have worried that risk-averse actors can negatively influence the development of important intellectual property law doctrines, which can ultimately hamper innovation. For instance, risk-averse actors may frequently choose to obtain licenses for rights that the relevant laws do not actually require of them. When they do so, they inadvertently increase the scope of intellectual property rights because their risk-averse activities inform courts’ development of key intellectual property law doctrines.

In this Article, prepared as part of the IP …

When Standards Collide With Intellectual Property: Teaching About Standard Setting Organizations, Technology, And Microsoft V. Motorola, Cynthia L. Dahl

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Gene Patents, Drug Prices, And Scientific Research: Unexpected Effects Of Recently Proposed Patent Eligibility Legislation, Charles Duan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Recently, Congress has considered legislation to amend§ 101, a section of the Patent Act that the Supreme Court has held to prohibit patenting of laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. This draft legislation would expand the realm of patent-eligible subject matter, overturning the Court's precedents along the way. The draft legislation, and movement to change this doctrine of patent law, made substantial headway with a subcommittee of the Senate holding numerous roundtables and hearings on the subject.

This article considers some less-discussed consequences of that draft legislative proposal. The legislation likely opens the door to patenting of subject …

Of Monopolies And Monocultures: The Intersection Of Patents And National Security, Charles Duan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

It was certainly an odd thing for the Department of Justice attorney arguing for the United States to appear before the Ninth Circuit to tell the appellate judges that a federal agency was wrong. This was what happened in a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action against Qualcomm Inc., a semiconductor technology company. As a substantial holder of patents on mobile communications technologies and also a leading manufacturer of chips used in that same industry, the FTC charged Qualcomm with anticompetitive conduct; the district court agreed and enjoined Qualcomm from certain patent licensing practices. It was that award of injunctive relief …

The Cost Of Novelty, Will Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Patent law tries to spur the development of new and better innova­tive technology. But it focuses much more on “new” than “better”—and it turns out that “new” carries real social costs. I argue that patent law promotes innovation that diverges from existing technology, either a little (what I call “differentiating innovation”) or a lot (“exploring innova­tion”), at the expense of innovation that tells us more about existing technology (“deepening innovation”). Patent law’s focus on newness is unsurprising, and fits within a well-told narrative of innovative diversity accompanied by market selection of the best technologies. Unfortunately, innovative diversity brings not only …

Brief Fof The R Street Institutte, Public Knowledge, And The Niskanen Center As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan, Meredith F. Rose

Amicus Briefs

The Java SE declarations of this case are simply a language of commands. As an application programming interface, or API, they exhibit features common to any language: a structured vocabulary and grammatical syntaxes, which a computer system understands as instructions to perform predefined tasks. What Oracle accuses as infringement is “reimplementation,” namely the building of a system, in this case Google’s Android platform, that repurposes the same words and syntaxes of the Java declarations.

Artificial Creativity: A Case Against Copyright For Ai-Created Visual Artwork, Megan Svedman

IP Theory

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly complex, and provides examples of compelling, human-like performances. One such artificial intelligence technology is known as Creative Adversarial Network (“CAN”) technology, which relies on inputs of preexisting pieces of art to create pieces of original art that pass as human-made. Whether the coders responsible for CAN-technology should be granted coverage for the resultant art remains an open question in United States jurisprudence. This paper seeks to explore why, given both software’s historical legacy in copyright law and bedrock copyright justifications, extending copyright coverage to the coders responsible for CAN technology would be a grave misstep …

Tracing The Evolution Of Standards And Standard-Setting Organizations In The Ict Era, Manveen Singh

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Didn't Happen: An Essay In Speculation, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Most of us held off celebrating the beginning of a renewed slow trickle of works into copyright's public domain until the first seconds of New Year's Day, 2019, but (if it hadn't been so early in the day), we would have been entitled to raise a glass at 4:04 PM on the preceding December 27th, when the last substantive business undertaken in 2018 by either house of Congress was concluded in the Senate. (Like the House, which wrapped up its business at 4:02, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body had convened that day at 4:00.) At that moment, a last-minute push …

How The Internet Unmakes Law, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Internet As A Speech Machine And Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform, Mary Anne Franks, Danielle Citron

Articles

No abstract provided.