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Full-Text Articles in Law
Owning Colors, Deborah R. Gerhardt, John Mcclanahan Lee
Owning Colors, Deborah R. Gerhardt, John Mcclanahan Lee
Faculty Publications
Part I of this article explores how different disciplines have contended with understanding color as a signifier of embodied and referential meaning. As a path towards understanding embodied meaning, we summarize what scientific literature teaches about the process behind color vision and biological responses to different color wavelengths. We then turn to the referential or learned meaning of colors. The scholarly literature from psychology, art, religious history, marketing, political science, and behavioral economics overwhelmingly supports the proposition that color sends varied and contradictory expressive signals that are elastic over time and cultural context. Given the many possible and contradictory messages …
Patent Trolls, Nuisance Suits, And The Federal Trade Commission, Matthew Spitzer
Patent Trolls, Nuisance Suits, And The Federal Trade Commission, Matthew Spitzer
North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology
The Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC’s”) Patent Assertion Entity Activity Report (“The Report”) includes a path-breaking collection of data. The Report was compiled with the object of changing policy, both in Congress and before the courts. Because of the FTC’s ability to force businesses and individuals to provide information, a power that no ordinary researcher possesses, the FTC has amassed a data set that can potentially be of great value. For example, the Report’s description of litigation Patent Assertion Entities’ (“PAEs”) and portfolio PAEs’ structure and behavior is, although not entirely new, very instructive. Unfortunately, the FTC made analytical errors that …
Beware The Trademark Echo Chamber: Why Federal Courts Should Not Defer To Uspto Decisions, Deborah R. Gerhardt
Beware The Trademark Echo Chamber: Why Federal Courts Should Not Defer To Uspto Decisions, Deborah R. Gerhardt
Faculty Publications
This Article explains why federal courts should not defer to United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) trademark decisions. Under United States trademark law, actual use of a mark on specific goods or services is required to support federal trademark registration. The USPTO processes a tremendous volume of applications to register trademarks. In order to do so expeditiously, trademark examiners use heuristics drawn from past USPTO registration data. While markets continually change, each trademark registration is updated at five or ten-year renewal intervals. Accordingly, much of the data does not reflect current market use. A recent audit established that many …
Surgically Precise But Kinematically Abstract Patent Claims, Andrew Chin
Surgically Precise But Kinematically Abstract Patent Claims, Andrew Chin
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Publication Of Government-Funded Research, Open Access, And The Public Interest, Julie Kimbrough, Laura N. Gasaway
Publication Of Government-Funded Research, Open Access, And The Public Interest, Julie Kimbrough, Laura N. Gasaway
Faculty Publications
Public access to government-funded research is an issue of tremendous importance to researchers, librarians, and ordinary citizens around the world. Based on the notion that taxpayers finance research through their tax dollars, research data should be available to them. Rapid, unfettered access to research publications provides access to medical research to patients, encourages further exploration and inquiry by other researchers, informs citizens, and advances scientific research. Scientists typically write articles that divulge the results of their government-funded research. Prior to the open access movement, these articles were published in commercially produced journals. Subscriptions to these journals are expensive, and cost …
The Ontological Function Of The Patent Document, Andrew Chin
The Ontological Function Of The Patent Document, Andrew Chin
Faculty Publications
With the passage and impending implementation of the “first-to-file” provisions of the America Invents Act of 2011, the U.S. patent system must rely more than ever before on patent documents for its own ontological commitments concerning the existence of claimed kinds of useful objects and processes. This Article provides a comprehensive description of the previously unrecognized function of the patent document in incurring and securing warrants to these ontological commitments, and the respective roles of legal doctrines and practices in the patent system’s ontological project. Among other contributions, the resulting metaphysical account serves to reconcile competing interpretations of the written …