Law Commons^™

The Knottiest Problem: Unraveling Arising Under Jurisdiction In Copyright Cases, Zoe Niesel, Bethany A. Corbin

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Innovation Prizes In Practice And Theory, Michael J. Burstein, Fiona Murray

Faculty Articles

Innovation prizes in reality are significantly different from innovation prizes in theory. The former are familiar from popular accounts of historical prizes like the Longitude Prize: the government offers a set amount for a solution to a known problem, like £20,000 for a method of calculating longitude at sea. The latter are modeled as compensation to inventors in return for donating their inventions to the public domain. Neither the economic literature nor the policy literature that led to the 2010 America COMPETES Reauthorization Act — which made prizes a prominent tool of government innovation policy — provides a satisfying justification …

The Supreme Court's Quiet Revolution In Induced Patent Infringement, Timothy R. Holbrook

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court over the last decade or so has reengaged with patent law. While much attention has been paid to the Court’s reworking of what constitutes patent-eligible subject matter and enhancing tools to combat “patent trolls,” what many have missed is the Court’s reworking of the contours of active inducement of patent infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b). The Court has taken the same number of § 271(b) cases as subject matter eligibility cases—four. Yet this reworking has not garnered much attention in the literature. This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the Court’s efforts to define active …

Copyright’S Other Functions, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

This response to a keynote speech by Judge Margaret McKeown explores some dimensions of copyright in addition to its dominant function as a set of market-facilitating exclusive rights. The recent possible trend towards protecting privacy and other non-commercial concerns via copyright law is not necessarily inconsistent with its historical usages, does not necessarily threaten freedom of expression and may further important privacy policies. The balance of these competing policies is shifting, especially in an environment of proliferating digital content where cyber civil rights may need further development in response to cyberbullying. It examines the specific case of non-consensual pornography as …

Ip Litigation In U.S. District Courts: 1994-2014, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

This Article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of intellectual property ("IP") litigation in U.S. federal district courts from 1994 to 2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright, patent, and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes a systematic analysis of the records of more than 190,000 cases filed in federal courts and examines the subject matter, geographical, and temporal variation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades.

This Article analyzes changes in the distribution of IP litigation over time and their regional distribution. The key findings of this Article stem from an attempt …

Innovation, The State And Private Enterprise: A Corporate Lawyer's Perspective, Charles M. Yablon

Faculty Articles

This is a review essay based on an important recent book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, by Mariana Mazzucato, a Professor of the Economics of Innovation. In that book, Professor Mazzucato explains how the U.S. Government, acting as an “entrepreneurial state” has made the critical investments in technologies that have given rise to multi-billion dollar new industries. Mazzucato argues that only the State currently has the funds and incentives necessary to finance the earliest and most important phases of the innovation process, investments the private sector cannot and will not make. Mazzucato’s defense of the centrality …