Law Commons^™

Sticky Knowledge In Copyright, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Knowledge is sticky because it adheres to people along social routes, lodged within relational and collective modalities, as well as through copyright's proverbial fixed works that can be transacted more freely. Sticky knowledge may in fact constitute a much larger body of knowledge than we usually acknowledge in intellectual property and may intersect with copyright in unexpected ways. This Article delves into sticky knowledge, which has been referenced often outside of intellectual property and sometimes within the laws of patents and trade secrets but almost not at all within copyright law. Under what circumstances will sticky knowledge encourage robust knowledge …

The Google Book Settlement And The Fair Use Counterfactual, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

The sprawling Google Book Search litigation began as a dispute between the search engine colossus and a variety of authors and publishers over the legality of Google’s book digitization effort, the Google Book Search project (“GBS” or “Google Book Search”), for the purpose of indexing paper collections and making them searchable on the Internet. However, through the metamorphic power of class action litigation, a dispute over mere indexing and searching has been transformed into a comprehensive agreement over the future of the book as a digital commodity. Understanding this transformation and its implications is the central ambition of this article. …

Ideology And Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property: An Empirical Study, Matthew Sag, Tonja Jacobi, Maxim Sytch

Faculty Articles

In this Article, we examine the effect of judicial ideology on IP case outcomes before the Supreme Court from 1954 to 2006. We find that ideology is a significant determinant of IP cases: the more conservative a justice is, the more likely he or she is to vote in favor of recognizing and enforcing rights to intellectual property. We also find evidence that the relationship is more complex than a purely ideological account would suggest; our results suggest that law matters too. We find that a number of factors that are specific to IP are also consequential. Additionally, we show …

Protecting Intellectual Property In China: A Selective Bibliography And Resource For Research, Robert H. Hu

Faculty Articles

This bibliography is intended to help American law students, attorneys, legal scholars, and law librarians to conduct research on Chinese intellectual property law, a topic of increasing importance, both theoretically and practically. The bibliography gathers books, book chapters, and law review articles to facilitate research in this subject area. Selected web sites are included to aid easy access to the Chinese IP laws, regulations, cases, and other relevant information.

International Legal Protection Of Trademarks In China, Robert H. Hu

Faculty Articles

This article addresses major trademark-related international regimes in which China participates. The article discusses the Chinese obligations under certain international treaties and agreements, both multilateral and bilateral, and use some Chinese court decisions to illustrate how these obligations are fulfilled in its judicial practice. Finally, the article provides an assessment of the effectiveness of these international regimes in China and offers observations on future development in protection through better enforcement. Three arguments are made: (1) International trademark law is taking roots in China; (2) China is taking its international obligations to protect trademarks seriously, and it has achieved much in …

Marks Of Rectitude, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Trademarks and certification marks increasingly denote sustainability or social responsibility standards. These marks of rectitude are particularly noticeable in the context of global trade, where market integration is accompanied by relatively uneven integration of environmental, labor and other standards, and where consumers in the so-called global North choose how to empower producers and/or encourage development of markets in the global South. But consumer participation in these transactions is under-explored by reference to criteria such as the quality not to mention accountability and transparency of the standards embedded within the goods or services. Newer stakeholders and meaning-makers such as the largely …

The Need For Speed (And Grace): Issues In A First-Inventor-To-File World, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” This lyric applies to the United States which, since 1998, stands alone among the world’s patent systems in awarding patents to the first person to invent a claimed invention (first to invent, or “FTI”) as opposed to the first inventor to file an application claiming the invention (“FITF”). But its lonely days may soon be over: a provision in pending patent reform legislation will (if passed) move the United States from FTI to FITF and end its solitary stance.

Some argue that the U.S. already has a de facto FITF system, …

Patent Reform And Differential Impact, Matthew Sag, Kurt W. Rohde

Faculty Articles

The structure of the article is as follows. Part I provides an introduction to the problems created by bad patents and introduces the differential impact test for evaluating patent reform proposals.

Part II examines the origin of bad patents and applies two different economic models to explain their persistence. The first model focuses on a potential infringer’s incentives to challenge a bad patent; the second model focuses on a patent holder’s incentive to assert a patent. We explain bad patents as an emergent phenomenon: they are the product of the apparently low quality of patent examination and the complex, uncertain, …

Intellectual Property From Below: Copyright And Capability For Education, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

An approach to intellectual property from within a human development framework can contribute meaningfully to the WIPO Development Agenda, which was approved by the WIPO General Assembly in September 2007. Setting the proper regulatory balance between exclusive rights and access through exceptions and limitations to those rights is key to building national innovation capacity. A human development framework allows intellectual property norm-setters to prioritize the development of healthy and literate populations who are foundational to the functioning knowledge economies that intellectual property already assumes. Building upon an earlier piece in which Professor Chon posited that a substantive equality principle was …

Slouching Towards Development In International Intellectual Property, Margaret Chon, Denis Borges Barbosa, Andrés Moncayo Von Hase

Faculty Articles

An understanding of intellectual property's classic innovation mandate as only one of many cross-cutting development goals should be well-accepted by now within international intellectual property law and policy, given the pervasiveness of development rhetoric at the WTO, WIPO and other regional and bilateral fora. Yet development "walk" lags behind development "talk" on both international and domestic levels. This article focuses on how intellectual property can promote development, not only through innovation, but also by the promotion of broad-based human development implicitly underpinning global knowledge economies. First, we consider the rapidly evolving relationship of development and trade to intellectual property, and …

Beyond Abstraction: The Law And Economics Of Copyright Scope And Doctrinal Efficiency, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Uncertainty as to the optimum extent of protection generally limits the capacity of law and economics to translate economic theory into coherent doctrinal recommendations in the realm of copyright. This Article explores the relationship between copyright scope, doctrinal efficiency, and welfare from a theoretical perspective to develop a framework for evaluating specific doctrinal recommendations in copyright law.

The usefulness of applying this framework in either rejecting or improving doctrinal recommendations is illustrated with reference to the predominant law and economics theories of fair use. The metric-driven analysis adopted in this Article demonstrates the general robustness of the market-failure approach to …

Academic Discourse And Proprietary Rights: Putting Patents In Their Proper Place, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Article provides a fresh perspective on the Bayh-Dole debate by focusing on the impact of patent novelty rules on academic discourse. The Article proposes that to begin to reverse an observed deterioration in disclosure norms, flexibilities must be built into the patent system so that patents can be facilitators of the academic knowledge dissemination enterprise. In particular, the Article advocates creation of an opt-in extended grace period that would provide more time for academic researchers to publish and present early-stage research before having to file a patent application. Such an extension, coupled with early application publication, would both address …

January 1, 2003: The Birth Of The Unpublished Public Domain And Its International Implications, Elizabeth Townsend-Gard

Faculty Articles

On January 1, 2003, a small, quiet historic transformation took place throughout the United States: unpublished works in mass came into the public domain for the first time. Section 302 of the 1976 Copyright Act created a unified system of duration, whereby unpublished and published works carry a term of life of the author plus seventy years. In order to aid with a transition from a state common law perpetual system to a "limited Times" federal statutory system, the 1976 Copyright Act built two mechanisms for change in the form of Section 303(a). First, Section 303(a) guarantees that no work …

Intellectual Property And The Development Divide, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

This article attempts to map the challenges raised by recent encounters between intellectual property and development. It proposes a normative principle of global intellectual property - one that is responsive to development paradigms that have moved far beyond simple utilitarian measures of social welfare. Recent insights from the field of development economics suggest strongly that intellectual property should include a substantive equality principle, measuring its welfare-generating outcomes not only by economic growth but also by distributional effects. A new principle of substantive equality is a necessary corollary to the formal equality principles of national treatment and minimum standards that are …

God In The Machine: A New Structural Analysis Of Copyright's Fair Use Doctrine, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Recognition of the structural role of fair use has the potential to mitigate some of the uncertainty of current fair use jurisprudence. The statutory framework for fair use both mitigates and causes uncertainty. It mitigates uncertainty by providing a consistent framework of analysis the four statutory factors. However, when judges apply the statutory factors without articulating or justifying their own assumptions, they increase uncertainty. The statutory factors mean nothing without certain a priori assumptions as to the scope of the copyright owner's rights. A more stable and predictable fair use jurisprudence would begin to emerge if those assumptions were made …

Trademarks Under The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) With References To The New Trademark Law Of Spain, Effective July 31, 2002, And The Current Mexican Law, Roberto Rosas

Faculty Articles

A trademark is any distinctive sign indicating that certain products or services have been manufactured or rendered by a specific person or company. This concept is currently recognized worldwide; however, the origin of trademarks dates back to antiquity when artisans placed their signatures or “marks” on their products containing an artistic or utilitarian element. Through time, these marks have evolved to such an extent that today, a reliable and efficient system for their registration and protection has been established. Besides protecting owners of trademarks, this system also helps consumers identify and purchase goods or services, which, because of the essence …

Legal Movements In Intellectual Property: Trips, Unilateral Action, Bilateral Agreements, And Hiv/Aids, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Article begins with an overview of the relationship between the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the "TRIPS Agreement") and the HIV/AIDS pandemic which created the need for the Doha Declaration. It then discusses two trade-related movements, unilateral action and TRIPS-plus bilateral agreements, that call into question the long-term effectiveness of the TRIPS Agreement process, generally, and the benefits of the Doha Declaration, in particular, in addressing multiple facets of the access to essential medicines problem. This Article concludes that a consideration of these issues should be included in the development of any further TRIPS-related solutions to …

Patently Unconstitutional: The Geographical Limitation On Prior Art In A Small World, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

Part I of this Article provides an overview of § 102 of the Patent Act, the role of prior art in the patentability analysis, and the origin of the limitation on relevant non-patent, nonpublished art to that existing "in this country." Part II then analyzes the constitutional deficiency of the limitation in light of the express and implied purposes of the Intellectual Property Clause as informed by judicial decisions, technological changes, global contraction, and expanded notions of inventive research sources. Policy concerns are the focus of Part III, which discusses how § 102's geographical limitation facilitates forms of "biopiracy," conflicts …

Still Patently Unconstitutional: A Reply To Professor Nard, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

In Defense of Geographic Disparity is Professor Craig Nard's response to my article Patently Unconstitutional: The Geographical Limitation on Prior Art in a Small World (Patently Unconstitutional). According to Professor Nard, my article advocates "the elimination of [the] geographic disparity" of 35 U.S.C § 102 in order to "protect developing nations and indigenous peoples from Western countries' patent law regimes." Professor Nard is correct in his assertion that I seek the elimination of the geographical disparity in U.S. patent law; however, he misses the mark as to my reasons. My opposition to the geographical limitation does not derive from …

Internet Business Model Patents: Obvious By Analogy, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

Part I of this Article provides a look at Internet business model patents in light of key patentability requirements mandated by the Patent Act. Part II traces the evolution of the analogous art component of the non-obviousness determination and illustrates how the malleability of the doctrine, as exemplified in several Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decisions, has particular relevance to prior art definitions for Internet business model patents. Part III of this Article then examines the doctrine of equivalents and explores how the likelihood of improper application of this doctrine in the Internet business model context is increased. …

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same: Implications Of Pfaff V. Wells Electronics, Inc. And The Quest For Predictability In The On-Sale Bar, Timothy R. Holbrook

Faculty Articles

This Article posits a two prong approach to the on-sale bar. First, for the anticipatory version, the courts should expressly incorporate the law of enablement under 35 U.S.C. § 112 and of utility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 into the on-sale bar, thus providing a well-known body of law to promote predictability. Procedurally, the courts should establish a hierarchy of evidence, similar to the approach used in claim construction, that considers certain, more readily available information as the most pertinent while eschewing the use of expert testimony and other litigation based evidence. Second, for the obviousness version of the on-sale …

The Past, Present And Future Of Copyright Protection Of Soundalike Recordings, Kent Milunovich

Faculty Articles

This article suggests that copyright law can cover soundalike musical recordings. First, the facts and holding of Midler will be discussed as well as the court's motivation for not deciding the case on a copyright infringement basis. Second, an historical background for copyright infringement of music follows. This section involves a discussion of copyright infringement, parody, and fair use as well as a summary of existing case law regarding each topic. After an illustration of the dilemma of what copyright may protect involving the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears, the focus shifts to what could have been done to …

New Wine Bursting From Old Bottles: Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works, And Entrepreneurship, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Some intellectual property colleagues recently urged Professor Chon to post this article on SSRN. She wrote it circa mid-90’s when information still wanted to be free and the predominant technology was still file transfer protocol. It seems this piece has stood the test of time because it was one of the first legal academic pieces to address the copyright implications of Internet works. Today in 2010, we are still grappling with the collaborative, dynamic and entrepreneurial characteristics of digital networked content. However, now it is created and distributed through different intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Using Section 337 Of The Tariff Act Of 1930 To Block Materially Different Gray Market Goods In The Common Control Context: Are Reports Of Its Death Greatly Exaggerated?, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Comment examines the primary reasons for trademark owners within the common control exception to revisit section 337 when faced with materially different gray market goods. Part One discusses the issues in and history of the gray market goods controversy, and the common control exception. Part Two focuses on section 337: how it works, its use in gray market goods cases, and how it has changed as a result of amendments in the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 and in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994. Part Three traces the changes in the gray market landscape favorable …

Postmodern 'Progress': Reconsidering The Copyright And Patent Power, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

This article undertakes a postmodern analysis of the term ‘Progress’ in the Constitution’s Copyright Clause, finding stewarding the production of knowledge is integral to the clause. First, by deconstructing the linear, forward assumption entailing Progress. As technology concentrates, Progress entails distributional fairness and decentralized control over knowledge. Relying on the writings of the Founders and recent copyright decisions, this article does not limit postmodernism to a theory recognizing that words have multiple meanings, instead it argues that the Copyright Clause transforms the idea of knowledge to a common resource like water and air, and places knowledge into a public trust, …