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Full-Text Articles in Law
Resale Price Maintenance: Consignment Agreements, Copyrighted Or Patented Products And The First Sale Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Resale Price Maintenance: Consignment Agreements, Copyrighted Or Patented Products And The First Sale Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The rule of reason adopted for resale price maintenance in the Supreme Court’s Leegin decision, which upset the century old Dr. Miles rule of per se illegality, requires some reconsideration of a number of issues about antitrust treatment of RPM. Under the old per se rule, bona fide “consignment” agreements were not covered by Section 1 of the Sherman Act at all because there was said to be no qualifying “agreement” between the supplier and the dealer. Rather the dealer was simply said to be acting as an agent of the seller. However, insofar as RPM produces competitive dangers, such …
Explaining The Demise Of The Doctrine Of Equivalents, David L. Schwartz
Explaining The Demise Of The Doctrine Of Equivalents, David L. Schwartz
All Faculty Scholarship
This article provides a novel theoretical model and extensive empirical evidence to explain the decline of a historically important patent law doctrine known as the “doctrine of equivalents.” In recent years, distinguished academics have studied the doctrine of equivalents. While these scholars noted that the doctrine of equivalents had decreased in its successful use and provided some grounds for the decline, none clearly explained why. As such, the cause and precise mechanism behind the so-called “demise” of the doctrine of equivalents have largely remained a mystery.
This article explains that the demise occurred because of two complementary forces discussed for …
Supplemental Examinations To Consider, Reconsider, Or Correct Patent-Related Information: A Tangled Web Indeed, Lisa Dolak
College of Law - Faculty Scholarship
A pending legislative proposal would authorize the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to undertake a “supplemental examination” of an issued patent to “consider, reconsider, or correct information believed to be relevant to the patent.” It would further bar the federal courts from holding a patent unenforceable “on the basis of conduct relating to information” considered during supplemental examination.
The obvious intent of the proposal is to constrain the federal courts’ power to entertain inequitable conduct-based challenges. Its emergence is unsurprising, given the mounting dissatisfaction with the courts’ application of the inequitable conduct doctrine. However, because the bill proposes to …
Lawyers Acting Badly, Or Not? Misconduct In Ip Litigation: Recent Examples And The Questions They Raise, Lisa Dolak
Lawyers Acting Badly, Or Not? Misconduct In Ip Litigation: Recent Examples And The Questions They Raise, Lisa Dolak
College of Law - Faculty Scholarship
Misconduct in civil litigation is not a new phenomenon. Nor is it confined to particular types of cases. Because of their characteristic intensity. however, intellectual property cases may be more likely to inspire bad behavior than other types of cases. The associated pressures seem, on occasion, to lead litigants and trial lawyers to succumb to the temptation to step outside the bounds of vigorous advocacy.
Trial and appellate judges in a number of recent IP cases have wrestled with the issue of whether certain litigation tactics crossed the line between advocacy and abuse. For example, trial judges have recently rebuked …
The Global Contours Of Ip Protection For Trade Dress, Industrial Design, Applied Art, And Product Configuration, Wendy J. Gordon, Orit Fischman Afori, Mark Janis, Jonathan Moskin
The Global Contours Of Ip Protection For Trade Dress, Industrial Design, Applied Art, And Product Configuration, Wendy J. Gordon, Orit Fischman Afori, Mark Janis, Jonathan Moskin
Faculty Scholarship
Before beginning, let me mention that I will confine myself to a limited number of arenas. Thus, for example, I'm not going to discuss design patents, which will be the focus of another speaker's remarks. I will also not discuss the doctrine of aesthetic functionality. My primary goal will be to compare trademark's doctrine of utilitarian "functionality" with copyright's domain of "separability," and to show how for at least two circuit court opinions, the two doctrines may be converging. I hope to stimulate discussion of whether such convergence would be a good idea.
Determining Uniformity Within The Federal Circuit By Measuring Dissent And En Banc Review, Christopher A. Cotropia
Determining Uniformity Within The Federal Circuit By Measuring Dissent And En Banc Review, Christopher A. Cotropia
Law Faculty Publications
This Article adds to the empirical literature examining how the Federal Circuit treats patent-law issues internally by comparing the decision making of the Federal Circuit with that of other courts of appeals. It does so by measuring two statistics from overall written opinions: the percentage of dissents and the percentage of en bane reviews. The data is taken from the Third, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, District of Columbia, and Federal Circuits between 1998 and 2009. The data in the study show that the Federal Circuit has the second-highest percentage of dissents among the circuits studied (behind only the Ninth Circuit) and …
Federal Circuit Patent Precedent: An Empirical Study Of Institutional Authority And Ip Ideology, David Pekarek-Krohn, Emerson H. Tiller
Federal Circuit Patent Precedent: An Empirical Study Of Institutional Authority And Ip Ideology, David Pekarek-Krohn, Emerson H. Tiller
Faculty Working Papers
In this paper, we aim to better understand the institutional authority of the Federal Circuit as a source of law as well as the influence of pro-patent and anti-patent ideological forces at play between the Supreme Court, Federal Circuit, and the district courts. Our specific focus is on the district courts and how they cite Federal Circuit precedent relative to Supreme Court precedent to support their decisions, whether they be pro-patent or anti-patent. Using a variety of citation approaches and statistical tests, we find that federal district courts treat the Federal Circuit as more authoritative (compared to the Supreme Court) …
Licensing And Patent Protection, Arijit Mukherjee, Aniruddha Bagchi
Licensing And Patent Protection, Arijit Mukherjee, Aniruddha Bagchi
Faculty Articles
We show the impact of technology licensing on optimal patent policy. Strong patent protection that eliminates imitation may not be the equilibrium outcome in the presence of licensing. Depending on the cost of innovation, licensing may either increase or reduce the strength of the patent protection.
Patent Misuse And Innovation, Marshall Leaffer
Patent Misuse And Innovation, Marshall Leaffer
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
An Empirical Study Of The Role Of The Written Description Requirement In Patent Prosecution, Dennis D. Crouch
An Empirical Study Of The Role Of The Written Description Requirement In Patent Prosecution, Dennis D. Crouch
Faculty Publications
An en banc Federal Circuit is now considering whether Section 112 of the Patent Act as properly interpreted includes a written description requirement that is separate and distinct from the enablement requirement. Although the USPTO has no direct role in the infringement dispute, the government submitted an amicus curie brief arguing that a separate written description requirement is “necessary to permit the USPTO to perform its basic examination function.” However, when pressed during oral arguments the government could not point to any direct evidence supporting its contention.
This essay presents the results of a retrospective empirical study of the role …
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This Article argues that the open-source and anti-expansionist rhetoric of current intellectual-property debates is a revolution of surface rhetoric but not of deep structure. What this Article terms “the Access Movements” are, by now, well-known communities devoted to providing more access to intellectual-property-protected goods, communities such as the Open Source Initiative and Access to Knowledge. This Article engages Movement actors in their critique of the balance struck by recent law (statutes and cases) and asks whether new laws that further restrict access to intellectual property “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Relying on cases, statutes and recent …