Law Commons^™

The Pharmaceutical Industry’S Corrupt Price Discrimination System: A Single Solution?, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

The patent exhaustion doctrine generally provides that when a patent holder sells or authorizes the sale of a patented product, the patent rights in that item are exhausted. The patent holder cannot chase the item down the stream of commerce to impose restrictions on its use or resale. One issue that arises is whether a domestic sale is required to trigger patent exhaustion, or if sales overseas can also trigger patent exhaustion. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (“TRIPS”) is agnostic on this question, providing that “nothing in this Agreement shall be used to address the issue …

A Patent Reformist Supreme Court And Its Unearthed Precedent, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

This paper examines the twenty-eight Supreme Court opinions overruling the Federal Circuit since 2000 and quantifies their rationales to discover that, while these reasons are often invoked, the Supreme Court’s most common rationale is that the Federal Circuit has disregarded or cabined its older precedent from before the 1982 creation of the Federal Circuit, from before the 1952 Patent Act, and even from before the 20th Century. The Court has relied on this rationale in twenty-one of the twenty-eight cases. The paper then seeks to probe beneath the surface level patterns to discover the deeper roots of the discord between …

The Substantial Identity Requirement Of Patent Infringement, Samuel F. Ernst

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No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court Case That The Federal Circuit Overruled: Westinghouse V. Boyden Power Brake Co., Samuel F. Ernst

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Can a federal court of appeals overrule Supreme Court precedent? Not overtly. But if nobody takes notice, a circuit court can undermine Supreme Court precedent, vacating lower court decisions that rely on the precedent and announcing in published opinions that a once robust doctrine has somehow suddenly become archaic, disfavored, and rarely applied. This is how the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has caused an important Supreme Court patent law doctrine to vanish: the reverse doctrine of equivalents, as announced by the Court in the 1898 case Westinghouse v. Boyden Power Brake Co. Hence Westinghouse represents forgotten precedent …

Total Patent Exhaustion!, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

The exhaustion doctrine generally provides that when a patent holder sells or authorizes another party to sell a patented item, the patent rights in that item are exhausted, and the patent holder cannot pursue that product down the stream of commerce to demand royalties from each party that subsequently acquires the item. Patent holders have often sought to evade patent exhaustion by drafting licensing agreements attending or authorizing the sale of their patented products that place restrictions on the use of the patented item or otherwise provide that no patent exhaustion has occurred. In Impression Products v. Lexmark, the Supreme …

Going Native: Can Consumers Recognize Native Advertising? Does It Matter?, David Franklyn, David A. Hyman, Calla Yee, Mohammad Rahmati

Publications

Native advertising, which matches the look and feel of unpaid news and editorials, has exploded online. The Federal Trade Commission has long required advertising to be clearly and conspicuously labeled, and it recently reiterated that these requirements apply to native advertising. We explore whether respondents can distinguish native advertising and "regular" ads from unpaid content, using 16 native ads, 5 '"regular" ads, and 8 examples of news/editorial content, drawn from multiple sources and platforms. Overall, only 37% of respondents thought that the tested examples of native advertising were paid content, compared to 81% for "regular" advertising, with variation by platform, …

Why Patent Exhaustion Should Liberate Products (And Not Just People), Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

Patent exhaustion is a doctrine that excuses infringement where the patent holder has either authorized the sale of a patented item or licensed its use or sale. Absent an effective contractual restriction, the patent holder's rights in the patented item are exhausted and the patent holder cannot sue for infringement based on further use or resale of the item. This Article explores the question of whether patent exhaustion adheres in the patented device or if it is a defensive doctrine that only adheres to the benefit of particular parties. Traditionally courts have articulated the doctrine as liberating the accused product …

The Lost Precedent Of The Reverse Doctrine Of Equivalents, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

Proponents of legislative patent reform argue that the current patent system perversely impedes true innovation in the name of protecting a vast web of patented inventions, the majority of which are never even commercialized for the benefit of the public. Opponents of such legislation argue that comprehensive, prospective patent reform legislation would harm the incentive to innovate more than it would curb the vexatious practices of non-practicing entities. But while the "Innovation Act" wallows in Congress, there is a common law tool to protect innovation from the patent thicket lying right under our noses: the reverse doctrine of equivalents. Properly …

The Problem Of Mop Heads In The Era Of Apps: Toward More Rigorous Standards Of Value Apportionment In Contemporary Patent Law, David Franklyn, Adam Kuhn

Publications

This article addresses this critical question of consumer demand surveys. The article argues that the law should always require rigorous apportionment of value based on scientifically-accepted standards of consumer demand measurement. Further, the article discusses how best to achieve this policy goal and how courts have approached it to date. This article then walks through the pertinent case law on apportionment, the role and defensibility of survey evidence, and offers guidance on proper survey design.

Trolls Or Toll-Takers: Do Intellectual Property Non-Practicing Entities Add Value To Society?, Samuel F. Ernst

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The 2015 Chapman Law Review Symposium will seek to advance the discussion of non-practicing entities in three ways: (1) by expanding on the scholarly debate surrounding patent trolls summarized above; (2) by expanding on the perspectives informing this debate beyond academia by inviting the views of practitioners from both sides of the patent troll divide; and (3) by expanding on the scope of this topic by considering the nature and possibility of copyright and trademark trolls.

Protecting The Boundaries: Unclaimed Consideration In The Patentee's Social Contract, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

This Article argues that the primary value society receives in the patentee social contract is not new inventions, but "unclaimed consideration." Unclaimed consideration takes many forms: additional innovations to improve on the patented invention, additional innovations created through efforts to design around the patented invention, innovations created by losers in the patent race, innovations informed by the unclaimed technical information in patents, commercialization of the patented invention or these other innovations, and the signals that patents give to investors regarding the value of a company or research lab. While there are many schools of patent scholarship engaged in spirited debate …

Patents Exhaustion For The Exhausted Defendant: Should Parties Be Able To Contract Around Exhaustion In Settling Patent Litigation?, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

The first sale doctrine provides that when a patent holder unconditionally authorizes another party to sell a patented item, the patent holder's right to exclude with respect to the patented item is "exhausted. " The licensee can then sell the patented item to a third party - a downstream purchaser - and the patent holder will not be able to sue the third party for patent infringement based on the resale or other use of that item. A principal animating policy behind the exhaustion doctrine is to prevent patent holders from receiving overcompensation for their patented inventions by, for example, …

Owning Oneself In A World Of Others: Towards A Paid-For First Amendment, David Franklyn, Adam Kuhn

Publications

The first Part of this Article charts a brief course through the history of the right of publicity and the First Amendment. The second Part studies the competing economic rights, their philosophical justifications, and their shortcomings. The third Part analyzes several major cases that dealt with the conflict of rights, criticizing the transformative use analysis as a proxy for economic value and explaining the shortfalls of the test. The fourth Part proposes a new theory of add-on value and a paid-for First Amendment.

The issue we identify is that a loosely defined doctrine of concurrent ownership (of the celebrity image) …

Trademarks As Search-Engine Keywords: Who, What, When, David Franklyn, David A. Hyman

Publications

Most Internet searches result in unpaid (organic or algorithmic) results, and paid ads. The specific ads that are displayed are dictated by the user's search terms ("keywords"). In 2004, Google began offering trademarks for use as keywords on an unrestricted basis, followed in due course by other search engines. Once that happened, any entity (including sellers of competing products) could have their ads appear in response to a search for the trademarked product. Trademark owners responded by filing more than 100 lawsuits in the United States and Europe, making the dispute the hottest controversy in the history of trademark law. …

Trademark Surveys: An Undulating Path, David Franklyn, Shari Seidman Diamond

Publications

When a plaintiff alleges trademark infringement or claims that false advertising is likely to confuse or deceive, the pivotal legal question is: how are consumers likely to perceive the mark or advertising? In the early days of trademark litigation, a parade of consumer witnesses, carefully selected by one of the parties to support a trademark claim, would testify about their reactions to a mark. That approach has given way to systematic survey evidence reflecting the responses of a substantial number of consumers selected according to an explicit sampling plan, asked the same questions, and unaware who sponsored the survey.

Part …

Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, David Franklyn, David A. Hyman

Publications

We report on the results of a two-part study, including three online consumer surveys and a coding study of the results when 2500 trademarks were run through three search engines. Consumer goals and expectations turn out to be quite heterogeneous: a majority of consumers use brand names to search primarily for the branded goods, but most consumers are open to purchasing competing products. We find little evidence of traditional actionable consumer confusion regarding the source of goods, but only a small minority of consumers correctly and consistently distinguished paid ads from unpaid search results, or noticed the labels that search …

Trademark And Copyright Enforcement In The Shadow Of Ip Law, William T. Gallagher

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In recent years, as Congress has created new intellectual property (IP) rights and courts have often interpreted those rights broadly, legal scholars have frequently decried the expanded scope of protection afforded IP owners in most substantive areas of IP law. According to this critique, the over-expansion of IP rights throughout the past two decades harms competition, chills free speech, and diminishes the public domain as increasingly broad areas of social life are brought within the scope of strong IP protection. While this over-expansion theory reflects an important-indeed, foundationalpolicy debate concerning the proper balance between IP owners' rights and the public's …

Right Of Publicity And The Intersection Of Copyright And Trademark Law, Marc Greenberg, Michael L. Lovitz

Publications

The Right of Publicity has its root in privacy law. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, in an 1890 article in the Harvard Law Review, first defined this right as the right “to be left alone”. William Prosser followed their lead by enunciating a personal right of privacy based in four categories: 1) Protection against intrusion into one’s private affairs; 2) Avoidance of disclosure of one’s embarrassing private facts; 3) Protection against publicity placing one in a false light in the public eye; and 4) Remedies for appropriation, usually for commercial advantage, of one’s name or likeness.

The first three of …

Offensive Venue: The Curious Use Of Declaratory Judgment To Forum Shop In Patent Litigation, Chester Chuang

Publications

Forum shopping is widespread in patent litigation because there are clear differences in outcomes among the various federal districts. An accused patent infringer that is sued in a particularly disadvantageous forum can file a motion to transfer to a more convenient forum, but the general consensus is that such motions are difficult to win. Accordingly, accused infringers often file declaratory judgment actions to forum shop. Such actions allow accused infringers to preemptively sue the patent owner in the accused infringer’s preferred forum, and are considered by many to be the best way for accused infringers to play the forum shopping …

Comics, Courts & Controversy: A Case Study Of The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Marc Greenberg

Publications

Cartoons and comics have been a part of American culture since this nation’s formation. Throughout that lengthy history, comics and cartoons have also been a subject of controversy, censorship, legislation, and litigation. They have been viewed as a threat to society and a cause of juvenile delinquency; they are scandalous, indecent, and obscene. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (“CBLDF”), a New York-based non-profit organization, provides legal defense for comic artists, collectors, distributors, and retailers who face civil and/or criminal penalties for the creation, sale, and ownership of comics, cartoons, graphic novels, and related works.

The Introduction to this article …

Future Of The Internet At Stake, Marc Greenberg

Publications

The Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, introduced Oct. 26, has generated a firestorm of controversy, with critics assailing it for its chilling effect on the web and the Internet. After deciding to investigate this bill, I waded through piles of critiques, both pro and con. The bill itself, written in 78 mind-numbing pages of dense legislatese, on an initial read-through doesn't contain any "gotcha" terms that immediately support the conclusion of legislative overreach. The ostensible purpose of the bill is to combat the activities of alleged "rogue websites" based outside the U.S., which are engaged in widespread copyright infringement …

Ip Legal Ethics In The Everyday Practice Of Law: An Empirical Perspective On Patent Litigators, William T. Gallagher

Publications

This article presents preliminary findings from a qualitative empirical study of patent litigators. Part of a larger and ongoing project studying intellectual property lawyers in patent, trademark, and copyright enforcement and litigation actions, this article focuses on ethical decision-making by patent litigators in the pretrial discovery process. The article is based on data from in-depth, semistructured interviews with fifty-five patent litigators and from a detailed case study of the infamous Qualcomm patent sanctions case. The article critically examines how patent litigators perceive of and respond to ethical issues that arise in the discovery process. It also analyzes the structural and …

Unjust Patents & Bargaining Breakdown: When Is Declaratory Relief Needed?, Chester Chuang

Publications

The Declaratory Judgment Act is a statute designed to give parties uncertain of their legal rights the ability to obtain a fair and impartial determination of those rights. Any action for declaratory relief must meet certain minimum jurisdictional requirements, but, interestingly, even if the case meets those requirements, the Act expressly gives courts the discretion to accept or decline the case. When, then, should a court take such a case, and when should it decline? This question is particularly important in patent cases given the frequency with which declaratory relief actions arise in patent litigation.

This Article contends that a …

The Pros And Cons Of Gene Patents, Chester S. Chuang, Denys T. Lau

Publications

The debate over human gene patents was recently reignited by New York federal Judge Robert Sweet, when he found isolated human gene sequences unpatentable in Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office , 702 F.Supp.2d 181 (S.D.N.Y. 2010). An appeal of the decision is pending, and in October, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae brief in the case arguing that such gene sequences should not be patentable, contradicting long-standing practices of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Given the potent impact of a possible gene patent ban on gene-based medical therapies and the …

Patenting Human Genes: The Myriad Controversy, Chester S. Chuang, Denys T. Lau

Publications

The controversy over human gene patents was reignited in March 2010 when a US Federal District Court decided that isolated human gene sequences are not patentable. An appeal is pending, although the US Department of justice filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in late October, arguing that such gene sequences should not be patentable. Because this case may eventually find its way to the US Supreme Court, the ruling could have significant implications for gene-based medical therapies and for the biotechnology industry overall. It is therefore important to assess both the past and present context of this controversy, taking …

Kurlan V. Cbs: Justice Carter’S Prescient Dissent— A Glimpse Into The Future Of Copyright Protection In The Entertainment Industry, Marc H. Greenberg

Publications

A scholar of intellectual property law quickly learns that complacency, and the privilege of working in a largely static and unchanging body of law, is not a benefit available to those who labor in this endlessly fascinating but fast-paced and always changing field. The 1953 decision of the California Supreme Court in Kurlan v. CBS (hereinafter “Kurlan”), provides yet another example of this principle. Many of the assumptions found in the majority decision have long been abandoned or substantially revised. Justice Carter’s dissent, however, contains the seeds of those revisions, and is prescient in its understanding of the need to: …

The Sly Rabbit And The Three C'S: Copyright, Calligraphy And China, Marc Greenberg

Publications

This article posits that among many different methods available to improve enforcement of Western-style intellectual property (IP) laws in China, ultimately, the most effective of these may be to support and aid the slow but steady shift in Chinese culture away from a collective society view towards an individual ownership view with broader support for the concept of individual rights and freedoms on a variety of fronts, not just the IP arena. Within this context, I note in passing that the movement in China to embrace many of the attributes of Western culture is a mixed blessing, as media coverage …

The European Court Of Justice Rules On Keyword Ads And Trademark Rights, David Franklyn

Publications

On March 22, 2010, the European Court of Justice ("ECJ") issued a decision finding Google not liable for trademark infringement in the context of its Ad Words program. The European Court of Justice issued its long-anticipated decision in the three Google AdWords cases referred to it by the French Cour de Cassation. The ruling only answers the questions posed to it by the Cour de Cassation. Nevertheless, the ECJ's decision should be favorable to Google and other keyword advertising vendors throughout Europe.

Green Warfare: An American Grand Strategy For The 21st Century, Colin Crawford

Publications

This Comment advocates an Apollo Program-type mentality in terms of "greening" American society from the top down-beginning with the military-in order to break the country's addiction to fossil fuels. In embracing a broad-based "green" strategy, the United States can weave together a number of priorities heretofore thought irreconcilable: national security, environmental protection, and economic growth. In defining a clear "enemy" - our dependence on fossil fuels - the U.S. can unite various segments of society around a value-neutral and universally beneficial policy objective. By calling upon the resources of academia, the military, and the business community, the government can harness …

What Is A "Law And Society" Approach To Intellectual Property?, William T. Gallagher

Publications

No abstract provided.