Law Commons^™

Trademarks As Surveillance Transparency, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We know very little about the technologies that watch us. From cell site simulators to predictive policing algorithms, the lack of transparency around surveillance technologies makes it difficult for the public to engage in meaningful oversight. Legal scholars have critiqued various corporate and law enforcement justifications for surveillance opacity, including contract and intellectual property law. But the public needs a free, public, and easily accessible source of information about corporate technologies that might be used to watch us. To date, the literature has overlooked a free, extensive, and easily accessible source of information about surveillance technologies hidden in plain sight: …

A Taxonomy Of Police Technology’S Racial Inequity Problems, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Over the past several years, increased awareness of racial inequity in policing, combined with increased scrutiny of police technologies, have sparked concerns that new technologies may aggravate inequity in policing. To help address these concerns, some advocates and scholars have proposed requiring police agencies to seek and obtain legislative approval before adopting a new technology, or requiring the completion of “algorithmic impact assessments” to evaluate new tools.

In order for policymakers, police agencies, or scholars to evaluate whether and how particular technologies may aggravate existing inequities, however, the problem must be more clearly defined. Some scholars have explored inequity in …

The Corruption Of Copyright And Returning It To Its Original Purposes, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since its inception, Copyright has had two purposes: the private interest of the author in being paid for her work and the public interest served by the dissemination of these works. Within the last two decades, though, some industries have systematically undermined both of those interests, redirecting the benefits of copyright towards themselves instead of the intended beneficiaries. This paper looks at the book, music, and entertainment industries, examines how copyright has been used to suppress the uses it was intended to foster, and explores ongoing and proposed avenues for course correction.

Storming Zuckerberg’S Castle, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A company’s server is its castle, Richard Epstein once declared. Because of this, anyone sending an email to that server needs permission to enter. Within its own logic, this seems incontrovertible, but it depends on a few logical steps worth unpacking. It begins with the premise that a man’s home is his castle. (The masculine pronoun in the early formulation seems relevant.) Let us accept that premise for the purpose of argument. Combining this premise with the investiture of legal personhood on a corporation, we might then deduce that a company’s home must be its castle. Finally, combining that …

From Lex Informatica To The Control Revolution, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal scholarship on the encounter between networked digital technologies and law has focused principally on how legal and policy processes should respond to new technological developments and has spent much less time considering what that encounter might signify for the shape of legal institutions themselves. This essay focuses on the latter question. Within fields like technology studies, labor history, and economic sociology, there is a well-developed tradition of studying the ways that new information technologies and the “control revolution” they enabled—in brief, a quantum leap in the capacity for highly granular oversight and management—have elicited long-term, enduring changes in the …

Restoring The Balance Of Copyright: Antitrust, Misuse, And Other Possible Paths To Challenge Inequitable Licensing Practices, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Libraries’ purposes of ensuring access to and preservation of information have been compromised as licensing increasingly replaces ownership. This article outlines various novel legal strategies that libraries could use to restore copyright’s intended balance, including antitrust, preemption, misuse, and unconscionability.

Copyright Reform: Imagining More Balanced Copyright Laws, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Earlier chapters of this book provide a history of copyright and libraries in the United States, a review of outdated language in the existing copyright code, and a discussion of actions by both copyright owners and the public to rebalance copyright outside of legislation. This chapter simply imagines what copyright could be if we disregard the known political and legal obstacles. It starts with no constraints, which one might argue is both impractical and foolish. Why spend time discussing what could be when treaties, self-interest, and powerful industry lobbies stand in the way?

The answer is simply that environments can …

Tailoring Election Regulation: The Platform Is The Frame, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to conventional wisdom, legislative efforts to limit platform-based electoral manipulation—including especially laws that go beyond simply mandating additional disclosure about advertising expenditures—are most likely doomed to swift judicial invalidation. In this Essay, I bracket questions about baseline First Amendment coverage and focus on the prediction of inevitable fatality following strict scrutiny. Legislation aimed at electoral manipulation rightly confronts serious concerns about censorship and chilling effects, but the ways that both legislators and courts approach such legislation will also be powerfully influenced by framing choices that inform assessment of whether challenged legislation is responsive to claimed harms and appropriately tailored …

The International Intellectual Property Commercialization Council’S 3rd Annual U.S. Conference: The State Of Innovation In The Union, Neel U. Sukhatme, Paul R. Zielinski, G. Nagesh Rao, Pj Bellomo, Matthew Byers, Meghan Gaffney Buck, Everardo Ruiz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The International Intellectual Property Commercialization Council (“IIPCC”) presented its third annual policy conference at the United States Capitol on May 6, 2019. The conference’s theme explored the question of “what is the state of innovation in the United States?” Panelists included The Honorable Andrei Iancu – Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office; Dr. Carl J. Schramm – University Professor, Syracuse University and Former President of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; Mr. Patrick Kilbride – Senior Vice President of the Global Innovation Policy Center (“GIPC”) at the U.S. Chamber of …

Illusory Conflicts: Post-Employment Clearance Procedures And The Ftc’S Technological Expertise, Lindsey Barrett, Laura M. Moy, Paul Ohm, Ashkan Soltani

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The federal government restricts what former employees can work on after they leave the government, and for good reason. These post-employment conflict restrictions attempt to address the “revolving door” problem, where employees take information learned from their position in government to unfairly advantage industry. But an unintended consequence of overbroad conflict rules is that they impede well-meaning, former federal employees from providing their knowledge and general expertise to other enforcement agencies with similar missions, such as those at the state level. This is playing out right now with FTC technologists, at a time when the agency—and, indeed, consumer protection agencies …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law And Economics Scholars In Support Of Appellee And Affirmance, Mark A. Lemley, A. Douglas Melamed, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In reliance on Qualcomm’s FRAND promises, key SSOs incorporated its technologies into wireless standards. Qualcomm takes the position that its patented technologies are essential to those standards and, therefore, that any firm making or selling a standard-compliant product infringes its patents. As a result, the SSOs’ incorporation of Qualcomm’s patented technologies into wireless standards created a huge market for licenses to Qualcomm’s SEPs.

The district court held that Qualcomm used its chipset monopolies, not only to extract the high chip-set prices to which it was entitled, but also to perpetuate those monopolies by disadvantaging rival chip-makers and raising entry barriers. …

Brief Of Amici Curiae 116 Law Librarians And 5 Law Library Organizations In Support Of Respondent, Georgia V. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150 (U.S. Oct. 16, 2019), Michelle M. Wu

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

Due process and the rule of law require that the public has meaningful access to “the law.” Every major modern society since the Greeks has recognized the importance of this principle. Roscoe Pound, Theories of the Law, 22 Yale L.J. 114, 117 (1912).

In the United States, “the law” largely comes from appellate courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies who have been granted rule-making authority. As every first year law student learns, those law-making bodies have developed highly specific methods for communicating their pronouncements of law through official publications, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (“OCGA”).

Those specific methods …

Dancing On The Grave Of Copyright?, Anupam Chander, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The quarter century since Barlow’s writing allows us to assess his prophecy. The economy moved in the very direction that Barlow anticipated—from an economy focused on the ownership of things to an economy based on services and experiences. In high-income countries, services now account for three-quarters of the gross domestic product.

But intellectual property proved more resilient and adaptable than Barlow predicted. Intellectual property law both offered exceptions where necessary, while simultaneously expanding to cover new forms of creativity and activities. In this short essay, we argue that, for good or ill, intellectual property has reconfigured itself for an economy …

Who Cares About Patents? Cross-Industry Differences In The Marginal Value Of Patent Term, Neel U. Sukhatme, Judd N.L. Cramer

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

How much do market participants in different industries value a marginal change in patent term (i.e., duration of patent protection)? We explore this research question by measuring the behavioral response of patentees to a rare natural experiment: a change in patent term rules, due to passage of the TRIPS agreement. We find significant heterogeneity in patentee behavior across industries, some of which follows conventional wisdom (patent term is important in pharmaceuticals) and some of which does not (it also appears to matter for some software). Our measure is highly correlated with patent renewal rates across industries, suggesting the marginal value …

Health Care Costs And The Arc Of Innovation, Neel U. Sukhatme, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and reinforces this nexus and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze.

Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, …

Revisiting Controlled Digital Lending Post-Redigi, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Now that the Second Circuit has ruled on the ReDigi appeal, some libraries and users may be curious to see how the decision factors into controlled digital lending (CDL) efforts. To understand the interest and the implications, we first need to establish the basic contours of copyright, fair use, CDL, and ReDigi.

Internet Utopianism And The Practical Inevitability Of Law, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

"Writing at the dawn of the digital era, John Perry Barlow proclaimed cyberspace to be a new domain of pure freedom. Addressing the nations of the world, he cautioned that their laws, which were “based on matter,” simply did not speak to conduct in the new virtual realm. As both Barlow and the cyberlaw scholars who took up his call recognized, that was not so much a statement of fact as it was an exercise in deliberate utopianism. But it has proved prescient in a way that they certainly did not intend. The “laws” that increasingly have no meaning in …

Turning Privacy Inside Out, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problem of theorizing privacy moves on two levels, the first consisting of an inadequate conceptual vocabulary and the second consisting of an inadequate institutional grammar. Privacy rights are supposed to protect individual subjects, and so conventional ways of understanding privacy are subject-centered, but subject-centered approaches to theorizing privacy also wrestle with deeply embedded contradictions. And privacy’s most enduring institutional failure modes flow from its insistence on placing the individual and individualized control at the center. Strategies for rescuing privacy from irrelevance involve inverting both established ways of talking about privacy rights and established conventions for designing institutions to protect …

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, like enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods LLC illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically …

Intellectual Property In Experience, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.

Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that …

The Public Trust In Public Art: Property Law's Case Against Private Hoarding Of “Public” Art, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Private hoarding of important works of art is a phenomenon that has caused their disappearance from public view. The loss of this art undermines republican values like education, community, and citizenship, and therefore should be resisted. This Article explores various legal tools to prevent this from happening, including doctrines and laws that protect artists’ rights in their work, but which offer the public little relief. Turning to two well-known common-law doctrines—public dedication and public trust—to see whether they might provide a solution, the author favors the latter because it is nimbler and better suited to the public nature of important …

How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence's Implicit Bias Problem, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, we have seen an increase in examples of AI systems reflecting or exacerbating societal bias, from racist facial recognition to sexist natural language processing. These biases threaten to overshadow AI’s technological gains and potential benefits. While legal and computer science scholars have analyzed many sources of bias, including the unexamined assumptions of its often homogenous creators, flawed algorithms, and incomplete datasets, the role of the law itself has been largely ignored. Yet just as code and culture play significant roles in how AI agents learn about and act in the …

The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction Of The Surveillance Economy, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain — a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a …

The Battle To Define Asia’S Intellectual Property Law: From Tpp To Rcep, Anupam Chander, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A battle is under way to decide the intellectual property law for half the world’s population. A trade agreement that hopes to create a free trade area even larger than that forged by Genghis Khan will define intellectual property rules across much of Asia and the Pacific. The sixteen countries negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) include China, India, Japan, and South Korea, and stretch to Australia and New Zealand. A review of a leaked draft reveals a struggle largely between India on one side and South Korea and Japan on the other over the intellectual property rules that …

Reaching For Mediocrity: Competition And Stagnation In Pharmaceutical Innovation, Son Le, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patents might incentivize invention but they do not guarantee firms will invest in projects that maximize social utility. We model how risk-neutral firms’ ability to obtain substantial private returns on marginal new technologies causes them to “reach for mediocrity” by investing in socially-suboptimal projects, even in the presence of competition and new entrants. Focusing primarily on pharmaceutical innovation, we analyze various policy interventions to solve this underinvestment problem. In particular, we describe a new approach to patents – a value based patent system, which ties patent protection to the underlying invention’s social value – and show how it incentivizes socially-optimal …

Information Privacy Litigation As Bellwether For Institutional Change, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Information privacy litigation is controversial and headline-grabbing. New class complaints are filed seemingly every few weeks. Legal scholars vie with one another to articulate more comprehensive theories of harm that such lawsuits might vindicate. Large information businesses and defense counsel bemoan the threats that information privacy litigation poses to corporate bottom lines and to “innovation” more generally. For all that, though, the track record of litigation achievements on the information privacy front is stunningly poor. This essay examines emerging conventions for disposing of information privacy claims, including denial of standing, enforcement of boilerplate waivers, denial of class certification, and the …

Fixing Incontestability: The Next Frontier?, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Incontestability is a nearly unique feature of American trademark law, with a unique American implementation. The concept of incontestability allows a trademark registrant to overcome arguments that a symbol is merely descriptive of features or qualities of the registrant’s goods or services—for example, “Juicy” for apples. Incontestability provides a nearly irrebuttable presumption of trademark meaning, which is a powerful tool for trademark owners. Unfortunately, incontestability is not granted as carefully as its power would counsel. Courts may misunderstand either the prerequisites for, or the meaning of incontestability, allowing trademark claimants to assert rights that they don’t actually have

Incontestability needs …

Who Runs The Internet?, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is no single answer to the question of who runs the Internet. Is it the United States, often seen as the hegemon of the Internet, home to so many of the world’s leading Internet enterprises? Is it China, which erects a “Great Firewall” to assert control over the portion of the Internet available in China? Is it the European Union, which extends its power globally through its data protection regime, designating countries as “adequate” or (implicitly) “inadequate” to receive its data? Is it ICANN, the California not-for-profit organization that controls how Internet addresses are allocated? Is it the World …

The Regulatory State In The Information Age, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines the regulatory state through the lens of evolving political economy, arguing that a significant reconstruction is now underway. The ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one has created existential challenges for regulatory models and constructs developed in the context of the industrial economy. Contemporary contests over the substance of regulatory mandates and the shape of regulatory institutions are most usefully understood as moves within a larger struggle to chart a new direction for the regulatory state in the era of informational capitalism. A regulatory state optimized for the information economy must develop …

The Luxembourg Effect: Patent Boxes And The Limits Of International Cooperation, Lilian V. Faulhaber

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article uses patent boxes, which reduce taxes on income from patents and other IP assets, to illustrate the fact that the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice has a longer reach than has previously been recognized. This article argues that, along with having effects within the European Union, the ECJ’s decisions can also have effects on countries outside of the EU. In the direct tax context, the ECJ’s jurisprudence has hampered the ability of both EU and non-EU countries to police international tax avoidance.

In 2015, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposed restrictions on patent …