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Limitations And Exceptions In The Wipo Instrument On Genetic Resources And Associated Traditional Knowledge, Sean Flynn
Limitations And Exceptions In The Wipo Instrument On Genetic Resources And Associated Traditional Knowledge, Sean Flynn
Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series
One of the hot topics in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on an instrument on “Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge Associated with Genetic Resources” is whether and what exceptions language should be included in the text. At the brief public report from Committee I on May 15, 2024, the Chair reported: “There appears to be adequate support for eliminating Article 4, limitations and exceptions. Some parties opposed.” This Blog provides some background information on the Article and analysis of potentially applicable models and concepts for the provision, including analysis of similar treaties with no exceptions.
Sanctions For Non Disclosure, As Set Out In Article 6 Of The Wipo Basic Proposal On Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources And Traditional Knowledge, Should Include Possible Revocation Of A Patent, James Love, Claire Cassedy
Sanctions For Non Disclosure, As Set Out In Article 6 Of The Wipo Basic Proposal On Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources And Traditional Knowledge, Should Include Possible Revocation Of A Patent, James Love, Claire Cassedy
Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series
The basic proposal for an international legal instrument relating to intellectual property, genetic resources and traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources prepared by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Secretariat (GRATK/DC/3) sets out in its Article 3 a narrow obligation to disclose (1) the country of origin of the genetic resource, or if not known, its source, and (2) the Indigenous Peoples or local community that provided traditional knowledge associated with the genetic resource, or the source of such knowledge.
Article 6 of the basic proposal sets out the sanctions and remedies for failures to make such disclosures. Among the …
Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan
Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature …
Brief For The Coalition Against Patent Abuse As Amicus Curiae In Support No Party, Charles Duan
Brief For The Coalition Against Patent Abuse As Amicus Curiae In Support No Party, Charles Duan
Amicus Briefs
Perhaps unexpectedly, a case on the constitutionality of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has major significance to the pressing policy crisis of drug prices in the United States. Erroneously issued patents monopolize medical therapies, making them unaffordable or inaccessible to numerous Americans. The inter partes review proceedings that the Board conducts have repeatedly and successfully overcome such patents, enabling competition and dramatically lowering prices. This Court should ensure the continued viability of the Board and of inter partes review, by preserving the Board’s objectivity and independence from executive branch political influence.
Kenya’S Intellectual Property Bill, 2020, And Its Shortcomings In Adopting All Lawful Trips Public Health Flexibilities, Brook K. Baker
Kenya’S Intellectual Property Bill, 2020, And Its Shortcomings In Adopting All Lawful Trips Public Health Flexibilities, Brook K. Baker
Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series
Given the importance of access to medicines to human rights and well-being in Kenya, it is appropriate to analyze whether Kenya has currently incorporated the allowed public health flexibilities to the greatest extent possible in its draft Intellectual Property Bill, 2020. This analysis will focus on the patent, utility model, and enforcement measures only as they are the ones directly relevant to access to medicines and other health technologies. The analysis starts with the premise that Kenya wishes to avoid granting unwarranted patents on unworthy inventions, especially with respect to medicines and other health technologies. In particular, the assumption is …
Of Monopolies And Monocultures: The Intersection Of Patents And National Security, Charles Duan
Of Monopolies And Monocultures: The Intersection Of Patents And National Security, Charles Duan
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
It was certainly an odd thing for the Department of Justice attorney arguing for the United States to appear before the Ninth Circuit to tell the appellate judges that a federal agency was wrong. This was what happened in a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action against Qualcomm Inc., a semiconductor technology company. As a substantial holder of patents on mobile communications technologies and also a leading manufacturer of chips used in that same industry, the FTC charged Qualcomm with anticompetitive conduct; the district court agreed and enjoined Qualcomm from certain patent licensing practices. It was that award of injunctive relief …
Brief Fof The R Street Institutte, Public Knowledge, And The Niskanen Center As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan, Meredith F. Rose
Brief Fof The R Street Institutte, Public Knowledge, And The Niskanen Center As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan, Meredith F. Rose
Amicus Briefs
The Java SE declarations of this case are simply a language of commands. As an application programming interface, or API, they exhibit features common to any language: a structured vocabulary and grammatical syntaxes, which a computer system understands as instructions to perform predefined tasks. What Oracle accuses as infringement is “reimplementation,” namely the building of a system, in this case Google’s Android platform, that repurposes the same words and syntaxes of the Java declarations.
Brief Of The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan
Brief Of The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan
Amicus Briefs
It is a common but misleading premise of cases such as this one that the disappointed patent applicant has two options for judicial review: a 35 U.S.C. § 145 district court action and an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 141. The applicant also has a non-judicial option: administrative remedies within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
These administrative remedies add an important dimension to this case. The Court of Appeals adopted what it conceded was an atextual construction of § 145 expense recovery provision in order to ensure that § 145 actions were not cost-prohibitive to “small businesses and individual …
Brief For The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Brief For The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Amicus Briefs
The government and its agencies should be treated as a “person” that may petition to institute post-issuance review proceedings under the America Invents Act, for two reasons. First, permitting the government to seek review of patents under these proceedings best realizes the intent of Congress to make those proceedings widely available. Second, compared to the government’s alternative option for administratively challenging patents, AIA post-issuance review better serves important norms of procedure and governance, including transparency, due process, and separation of functions.
Brief For The R Street Institute And Engine Advocacy As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Brief For The R Street Institute And Engine Advocacy As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Amicus Briefs
Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, an inventor may not obtain a patent on an invention that has been “on sale” for more than a year. The question is whether, from this so-called on-sale bar, certain classes of sales should be exempted— sales under a confidentiality agreement, in Petitioner’s view; and sales to those other than the ultimate customers, according to the government.
Brief For The R Street Institute And Engine Advocacy As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Brief For The R Street Institute And Engine Advocacy As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan
Amicus Briefs
Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, an inventor may not obtain a patent on an invention that has been “on sale” for more than a year. The question is whether, from this so-called on-sale bar, certain classes of sales should be exempted— sales under a confidentiality agreement, in Petitioner’s view; and sales to those other than the ultimate customers, according to the government.
Court Capture, Jonas Anderson
Court Capture, Jonas Anderson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.
This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …
Nontechnical Disclosure, Jonas Anderson
Nontechnical Disclosure, Jonas Anderson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
One of the primary goals of the patent system is the broad dissemination of technical knowledge. But, as this Article argues, there is also an underappreciated amount of nontechnical knowledge contained in a patent, information that may in certain cases be more valuable to readers than the technical disclosure contained in a patent. This Article looks at various types of nontechnical disclosure to argue that appreciating the nontechnical aspects of patent disclosure can increase our understanding of what information patents are disseminating to the general public.
Empirical Studies Of Claim Construction, Jonas Anderson
Empirical Studies Of Claim Construction, Jonas Anderson
Working Papers
Patent claims define the scope of the patent right and hence are central to the operation of the patent system. Patent prosecutors devote substantial effort to crafting patent claims so as to maximize the scope of their right without “reading on” prior art (and thereby defeating novelty). Businesses seeking to enter a technology marketplace must be careful to avoid encroaching patent claims. Thus, when patentees enforce their rights, the interpretation of claim boundaries guides both validity and infringement analysis. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Markman v. Westview Instruments (517 U.S. 370 (1996)), holding that “the construction of a patent, …
Taming The Mongrel: Aligning Appellate Review Of Claim Construction With Its Evidentiary Character In Teva V. Sandoz, Jonas Anderson, Peter Menell, Arti Rai
Taming The Mongrel: Aligning Appellate Review Of Claim Construction With Its Evidentiary Character In Teva V. Sandoz, Jonas Anderson, Peter Menell, Arti Rai
Working Papers
In its seminal Markman decision, the Supreme Court sought to usher in a more effective, transparent patent litigation regime through its ruling that “the construction of a patent, including terms of art within its claim, is exclusively within the province of the court.” In the aftermath of this decision, the Federal Circuit adhered to its prior holding that claim construction is a “purely legal issue” subject to plenary de novo review, downplaying the Supreme Court’s more nuanced description of claim construction as a “mongrel practice” merely “within the province of the court.” Over nearly two decades of experience in the …
Informal Deference: A Historical, Empirical, And Normative Analysis Of Patent Claim Construction, Jonas Anderson, Peter S. Menell
Informal Deference: A Historical, Empirical, And Normative Analysis Of Patent Claim Construction, Jonas Anderson, Peter S. Menell
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Patent scope plays a central role in the operation of the patent system, making patent claim construction a critical aspect of just about every patent litigation. With the resurgence of patent jury trials in the 1980s, the allocation of responsibility for interpreting patent claims between trial judge and jury emerged as a salient issue. While the Supreme Court’s Markman decision usefully removed claim construction from the black box of jury deliberations notwithstanding its "mongrel" mixed fact/law character, the Federal Circuit's adherence to the view that claim construction is a pure question of law subject to de novo appellate review produced …
Brief Of Eleven Law Professors And Aarp As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Bilski V. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010) (No. 08-964), Joshua Sarnoff, Lori Andrews, Andrew Chin, Ralph Clifford, Christine Farley, Sean Flynn, Debra Greenfield, Peter Jaszi, Charles Mcmanis, Lateef Mtima, Malla Pollack
Brief Of Eleven Law Professors And Aarp As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Bilski V. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010) (No. 08-964), Joshua Sarnoff, Lori Andrews, Andrew Chin, Ralph Clifford, Christine Farley, Sean Flynn, Debra Greenfield, Peter Jaszi, Charles Mcmanis, Lateef Mtima, Malla Pollack
Amicus Briefs
This is the brief filed by Joshua Sarnoff and Barbara Jones on behalf of various law professors and AARP in the Bilski v. Kappos case, discussing constitutional limits to the Patent power.
One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll
One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The United States and its trading partners have adopted cultural and innovation policies under which the government grants one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. On a global basis, the reasons for doing so vary, but in the United States granting intellectual property rights has been justified as the principal means of promoting innovation and cultural progress. Until recently, however, few have questioned the wisdom of using such blunt policy instruments to promote progress in a wide range of industries in which the economics of innovation varies considerably.
Provisionally accepting the assumptions of the traditional economic case for intellectual …
Alternative Software Protection In View Of In Re Bilski, Charles Duan, Lauren Katzenellenbogen, James Skelley
Alternative Software Protection In View Of In Re Bilski, Charles Duan, Lauren Katzenellenbogen, James Skelley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) en banc decision, In re Bilski, redefined the standard for patenting processes including business methods and computer software. In Bilski, the Federal Circuit departed from the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" test it had established in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. SignatureFinancialGroup,Inc., which had been the standard for the past ten years. The Federal Circuit returned to a test articulated nearly 40 years ago by the Supreme Court in Gottschalk v. Benson, and clarified that State Street was "never intended to supplant the Supreme Court's test.", Under …
An Economic Justification For Open Access To Essential Medicine Patents In Developing Countries, Sean Flynn, Aidan Hollis, Mike Palmedo
An Economic Justification For Open Access To Essential Medicine Patents In Developing Countries, Sean Flynn, Aidan Hollis, Mike Palmedo
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This paper offers an economic rationale for compulsory licensing of needed medicines in developing countries. The patent system is based on a trade-off between the “deadweight losses” caused by market power and the incentive to innovate created by increased profits from monopoly pricing during the period of the patent. However, markets for essential medicines under patent in developing countries with high income inequality are characterized by highly convex demand curves, producing large deadweight losses relative to potential profits when monopoly firms exercise profit-maximizing pricing strategies. As a result, these markets are systematically ill-suited to exclusive marketing rights, a problem which …
One For All: The Problem Of Uniformity Cost In Intellectual Property Law, Michael W. Carroll
One For All: The Problem Of Uniformity Cost In Intellectual Property Law, Michael W. Carroll
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Intellectual property law protects the owner of each patented invention or copyrighted work of authorship with a largely uniform set of exclusive rights. In the modern context, it is clear that innovators' needs for intellectual property protection vary substantially across industries and among types of innovation. Applying a socially costly, uniform solution to problems of differing magnitudes means that the law necessarily imposes uniformity cost by underprotecting those who invest in certain costly innovations and overprotecting those with low innovation costs or access to alternative appropriability mechanisms.
This Article argues that reducing uniformity cost is the central problem for intellectual …