Law Commons^™

Access To Justice For Black Inventors, Jordana R. Goodman Assistant Professor Of Law, Khamal Patterson

Vanderbilt Law Review

To receive a patent, an inventor must meet certain inventive and procedural standards. Their invention must be novel, nonobvious, and written in such a way that any person skilled in the inventive subject can make and use the invention without undue experimentation. This process is far from objective.

An inventor is not always communicating within their own social circle. An inventor is required to communicate their invention so that a patent examiner believes a person having ordinary skill in the art ("PHOSITA") would recognize the invention as nonobvious. Moreover, a fictitious skilled person must be able to make and use …

Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia Garcia

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patent law and copyright law are widely understood to diverge in how they approach prior art, the universe of information that already existed before a particular innovation's development. For patents, prior art is paramount. An invention can't be patented unless it is both novel and nonobvious when viewed against the backdrop of all the earlier inventions that paved the way. But for copyrights, prior art is supposed to be virtually irrelevant. Black-letter copyright doctrine doesn't care if a creative work happens to resemble its predecessors, only that it isn't actually copied from them. In principle, then, outside of the narrow …

The Research Patent, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law Review

The patent system gives courts the discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent protection is sought. The fear is that an early-stage patent on a research input would confer too much control over yet-unknown uses for the chemical, thereby potentially hindering downstream innovation. Yet, denying patents on research inputs can frustrate patent law’s broad goal of protecting and promoting scientific and technological advances.

This Article addresses this problem by proposing a new form …

Reconceptualizing The Role Of Intellectual Property Rights In Shaping Industry Structure, Peter Lee

Vanderbilt Law Review

Technological and creative industries are critical to economic and social welfare, and the forces that shape such industries are important subjects of legal and policy examination. These industries depend on patents and copyrights, and scholars have long debated whether exclusive rights promote industry consolidation (by shoring up barriers to entry) or fragmentation (by promoting entry of new firms). Much hangs in the balance, for the structure of these IP- intensive industries can determine the amount, variety, and quality of drugs, food, software, movies, music, and books available to society. This Article reconceptualizes the role of patents and copyrights in shaping …

Keep Your Friends Close: A Framework For Addressing Rights To Social Media Contacts, Courtney J. Mitchel

Vanderbilt Law Review

A group of entrepreneurial recent college graduates starts a tutoring and test prep company focused on helping promising high school students get an edge on their college applications. Since the cost of print advertising exceeds the group's budget, they each actively promote the business on their personal social media accounts, garnering their first clients. They also create company accounts on Facebook, Linkedln, and Twitter, which clients join for easy, direct communication and quick access to information. Though all the founders contribute occasional posts and encourage their personal social media contacts to join the company accounts, one eventually becomes, in practice …

Trademarked For Death? A Licensee's Trademark Rights After An Executory Contract Is Rejected In Bankruptcy, Philip L. Lu

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1872, a young man named Claudio Alvarez Lefebre began manufacturing and selling high-quality rum in Cuba under the brand name "Ron Matusalem." In 1948, as the family-run business prospered, the company registered a trademark and corporate logo in the United States. Upon his death, Lefebre left the business-and the secret formulas for making his rum-to his wife and children. By the early 1960s, Lefebre's wife and children had immigrated to the United States, and they split the rum-making business into two separate corporations. These two distinct entities negotiated an executory contract in the form of a franchise agreement with …

Costly Intellectual Property, David Fagundes, Jonathan S. Masur

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patents and copyrights originate from the same constitutional source of law,1 and for this reason they are in some respects similar. Patent and copyright law alike extend to inventors and authors exclusive rights over the fruits of their intellectual labors, enabling owners to extract value from intangible goods that would otherwise not be profitable. Both systems are premised on a utilitarian bargain, allowing inventors and authors to have socially costly monopoly interests in their inventions and works in order to encourage socially beneficial innovative and artistic production. And patents and copyrights both last only for finite periods, in contrast to …

The Pragmatic Incrementalism Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Vanderbilt Law Review

Intellectual property is today thought to be principally of statutory origin. Discussions of the subject invariably revolve around a close scrutiny of the federal statutes involved. Indeed, the frequency with which Congress amends the patent and copyright statutes seems to leave little doubt that it alone determines intellectual property's precise content and coverage.' Nevertheless, there exists a rather robust body of state law that is almost entirely the creation of state courts and is directed at creating entitlements in information, ideas, expression, goodwill, one's image, and other related intangibles. These rights regimes are in turn collectively referred to as "common …

Special Project: Current Issues In Intellectual Property, W. Russell Taber

Vanderbilt Law Review

A single legal concept has produced some of the greatest achievements of the human mind: intellectual property. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle denounced the then novel notion of rewarding those who create inventions beneficial to the state. History has been kind to Aristotle, but not because of his insights on intellectual property. The Venetian Senate's passage of the 1474 Act marked the beginning of systematic patent protection on European soil. Along with blown glassware, Venice later exported its penchant for patent protection to the rest of Europe, including Great Britain by the mid- sixteenth century. During the same era, the …

Copyright Infringement And Poetry: When Is A Red Wheelbarrow The Red Wheelbarrow?, Jennifer Understahl

Vanderbilt Law Review

Copyright does not protect facts or ideas, but only an author's original expression. Often, though, it is difficult to distill protected expression from unprotected ideas or facts that reside in the public domain. Copyright protection for poetry is particularly problematic because a poem's ideas are often intertwined with a poem's sounds, shape, and images. It is often not only difficult to extract ideas from a poem's surface, but once ideas are "discovered," it may even be difficult to articulate exactly what these main ideas or themes are. William Carlos Williams' poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, one of the most famous twentieth …

Introduction: Special Project - Current Issues In Intellectual Property, W. Russell Taber

Vanderbilt Law Review

A single legal concept has produced some of the greatest achievements of the human mind: intellectual property. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle denounced the then novel notion of rewarding those who create inventions beneficial to the state. History has been kind to Aristotle, but not because of his insights on intellectual property. The Venetian Senate's passage of the 1474 Act marked the beginning of systematic patent protection on European soil. Along with blown glassware, Venice later exported its penchant for patent protection to the rest of Europe, including Great Britain by the mid- sixteenth century. During the same era, the …

Protecting The Frontiers Of Biotechnology Beyond The Genome: The Limits Of Patent Law In The Face Of The Proteomics Revolution, J. Jason Williams

Vanderbilt Law Review

Scientific knowledge and invention rapidly accelerated in the past few decades, resulting in an untold number of broken barriers and realized benefits. In 2001, scientists announced that the human genome, consisting of 30,000 to 40,000 genes, had been fully characterized. Arguably one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history, this accomplishment came far sooner than anyone could have anticipated. Fueled by the enormous marketing potential in finding causes and cures for many diseases, the biotechnology industry invested heavily in the project with the hope of maximizing control of genetic intellectual property and its potential downstream value.

While the genomic …

The Law Of Trade Secrets: Toward A More Efficient Approach, Jon Chally

Vanderbilt Law Review

Trade secret law must efficiently protect that which can be considered a trade secret. Were the law to provide too little protection, information protected as a trade secret would not be created. Were the law to provide too much protection, competition would be unnecessarily stifled. Only efficient protection, meaning neither too little nor too much, appropriately addresses the unique nature of trade secrets as intellectual property. Such a conclusion becomes increasingly necessary given the rising import of trade secret law in the spectrum of intellectual property.

"It is the policy of the law, for the advantage of the public, to …

Bucking The Trend: The Unsupportability Of Index Providers' Imposition Of Licensing Fees For Unlisted Trading Of Exchange Traded Funds, Peter N. Hall

Vanderbilt Law Review

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are popular investment products that have recently generated substantial investment press, several new regulations, huge earnings for the securities markets, and potential legal conflicts that will likely lead to major litigation. ETFs are derivative securities that represent ownership in funds, unit investment trusts, or depositary receipts with portfolios of securities designed to track the performance and dividends of specific securities indices.' ETFs track indices by holding a representative sampling of securities in the index, thus approximating investment results of the index as a whole. They may or may not hold all the stocks in a particular …

Perfecting Patent Prizes, Michael Abramowicz

Vanderbilt Law Review

When anthrax attacks recently led to a run on the patented antibiotic drug Cipro, politicians and commentators suggested that the government consider purchasing generic alternatives. Some used the occasion to illustrate what they perceived as a broader problem with patent protection: that pharmaceutical companies seeking profits would not allow the sick to obtain access to needed medications. The argument repeated a familiar refrain in the intellectual property debate, as a long history of articles has inquired whether society would be better off with no patent or copyright law at all. Even recently, commentators have questioned the broad scope of intellectual …

Taking The Protection-Access Tradeoff Seriously, Harvey S. Perlman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and economics scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of both the nature of intellectual property rights generally and the features of individual intellectual property regimes. Indeed it is hard to imagine a field other than antitrust law that is so explicitly governed by economic thinking. In authorizing the copyright and patent systems, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution expressly incorporates a social welfare imperative as the basis for its grant of power.' Certainly economists and economically oriented legal academics have given the field the attention it is due.

I am far from being a sophisticated …

The Pharmaceutical Industry And World Intellectual Property Standards, F. M. Scherer

Vanderbilt Law Review

When I was a high school student during the late 1940s, the first so-called "wonder drugs"-initially penicillin and then the broad-spectrum antibiotics such as tetracycline-were entering the U.S. market. From their profitable experience developing the broad- spectrum antibiotics, the leading pharmaceutical companies of America and Europe acquired a strong research orientation that led to a cascade of new therapeutic entities, including additional anti-infectives, vaccines, diuretics, and then other agents to reduce heart attack risks, tranquilizers, antidepressants, birth control pills, anti-fungal agents, immuno suppressants, corticosteroids, AIDS inhibitors, powerful pain relief agents, and many other agents effective against specific diseases. Thanks to …

Patent Policy Innovations: A Clinical Examination, Josh Lerner

Vanderbilt Law Review

On the domestic front, the dispute has centered on the question of whether the United States should honor commitments made in bi- lateral agreements with Japan to remove idiosyncratic features of its patent system. In particular, legislation to require the publication of pending patent applications and to grant awards to the party that is first to file for an award (as are the practices in most nations) have been fiercely debated in the past few congressional sessions. In the developing nations, the requirements for minimal levels of patent protection in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariff and …

Elementary And Persistent Errors In The Economic Analysis Of Intellectual Property, Edmund W. Kitch

Vanderbilt Law Review

The literature on the economic analysis of intellectual property rights evidences a broad scholarly consensus on a number of central and important issues. First, intellectual property rights en- able economic actors to capture some of the benefits of the investment they make in establishing a good reputation, creating expressive works, and inventing new and improved technology. Absent intellectual property rights, copiers are free to take for themselves a significant part of the economic benefit generated by these types of investment and to undermine the incentive to make these in- vestments in the first place. Second, the investment activities induced by …

Games Economists Play, Rochelle C. Dreyfuss

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Professor Reichman called me about this symposium, I was intrigued. With the successive introduction of the photocopy machine, the videotape, computerization, digitization, the Internet, as well as a host of biotechnological discoveries, the problems facing the creative industries have changed dramatically. This accumulation of developments has altered the economic foundations on which intellectual property law is based and has pushed those of us in the field into a period of reconceptualization in which economic analysis is particularly fruitful. Thus, I was quite taken with the idea of bringing intellectual property and economics scholars together to promulgate a research agenda …

Shaping Competition On The Internet: Who Owns Product And Pricing Information?, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Vanderbilt Law Review

Historically, markets have almost always fallen short of satisfying the conditions for and providing consumers with the benefits of perfect competition. Certain characteristics of electronic markets, however, enhance the possibility that e-commerce will be conducted in an environment that comes closer to attaining the perfectly competitive ideal than that of most conventional markets. Essentially, technology analogous to that which users already employ to search the Internet can also enable this retailing revolution by allowing consumers easily to obtain comparative product and pricing information. However, for a number of reasons, on-line merchants (e-tailers), are asserting a variety of legal claims that, …

Cruel, Mean, Or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination And Digital Intellectual Property, James Boyle

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches .... What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich .... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to third-class passengers and mean …

Comment On "Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights", Paul Goldstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

Copyright is the "dog that didn't bark" in Keith Maskus's paper, "Lessons from Studying the International Economics of Intellectual Property Rights." Like virtually every other economic study of intellectual property and trade, the Maskus paper confines its examples and analysis to the industrial side of intellectual property-mainly patents and know-how-and leaves the authorial side-copyright-untouched. As a small step toward repairing this imbalance, and toward opening a corner of policy inquiry that has so far been largely unexamined, I would like here to make a few observations on copyright and trade in developing economies.

The regular omission of copyright from economic …

Intellectual Property Rights And The New Institutional Economics, Robert P. Merges

Vanderbilt Law Review

When someone speaks of "the law and economics of intellectual property rights" (IPRs), an image along the lines of the following diagram is apt to come to mind: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Intellectual Property Law, U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) School of Law. For helpful comments, the author wishes to thank members of the Vanderbilt Law School Conference, "Taking Stock: The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property Rights," April, 2000. The usual disclaimer applies.

This is the basic illustration of monopoly price and output, familiar from introductory microeconomic texts. It is often used to explain the effects of …

Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights

Vanderbilt Law Review

When the Uruguay Round negotiations began in 1986, the subject of intellectual property rights ("IPRs") was completely unfamiliar to international trade economists. Presumably the area was ignored because global trade policy concerns had not moved into questions of domestic business regulation. Even today, readers will search in vain for serious treatments of the trade implications of exclusive rights to intellectual property ("IP") in international economics textbooks.

Despite this general inattention, a small but growing literature has emerged in which trade economists have framed specific questions and applied theory and statistical analysis to them. This literature has advanced the understanding of …

Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights, Keith E. Maskus

Vanderbilt Law Review

When the Uruguay Round negotiations began in 1986, the subject of intellectual property rights ("IPRs") was completely unfamiliar to international trade economists. Presumably the area was ignored because global trade policy concerns had not moved into questions of domestic business regulation. Even today, readers will search in vain for serious treatments of the trade implications of exclusive rights to intellectual property ("IP") in international economics textbooks.

Despite this general inattention, a small but growing literature has emerged in which trade economists have framed specific questions and applied theory and statistical analysis to them. This literature has advanced the understanding of …

Who's Patenting What? An Empirical Exploration Of Patent Prosecution, John R. Allison, Mark A. Lemley

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patents are big business. Individuals and companies are obtaining far more patents today than ever before. Some simple calculations make it clear that companies are spending over $5 billion a year obtaining patents in the U.S.- to say nothing of the costs of obtaining patents elsewhere, and of licensing and enforcing the patents. There are a number of reasons why patenting is on the rise; primary among them are a booming economy and a shift away from manufacturing and capital-intensive industries towards companies with primarily intellectual assets. But whatever the reason, it is evident that many companies consider patents important. …

Copyright And The Perfect Curve, Julie E. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Everyone agrees that the purpose of the copyright system is to promote progress.' At the same time, though, skepticism about the law's ability to define the substance of progress runs deep within copyright case law and theory. Legal decisionmakers and scholars have quite properly doubted their own ability to evaluate artistic or literary merit, and have worried that efforts to do so would result in an inappropriately elitist and conservative standard. In addition, there is room for substantial debate about whether the metaphor of forward motion leaves out other important measures of what "progress" is or might be. This agnosticism …

Reverse Engineering Of Software For Interoperability And Analysis, S. Carran Daughtrey

Vanderbilt Law Review

The rapid evolution of computer technology raises difficult questions about the scope of protection the law should afford computer programs. Computer programs are uniquely different from traditional literary works protected by the copyright laws, because they have machine-like properties, are primarily functional in nature, and frequently are distributed in a form that humans cannot read. Despite these differences, however, computer programs have received protection under the copyright paradigm along with literary and artistic works. The United States historically has employed a highly protectionist approach to computer programs, as evidenced by early software infringement decisions in which courts slowly expanded protection …

Computer Programs As Applied Scientific Know-How: Implications Of Copyright Protection For Commercialized University Research, J. H. Reichman

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article surveys the problems that university administrators face when seeking to exploit proprietary rights in new technologies,with particular regard to computer software. In so doing, it explores larger questions about the proper role of intellectual property laws in protecting applied scientific know-how and the proper role of universities in exploiting the opportunities that such laws increasingly make available.