Law Commons^™

Intellectual Property And The Myth Of Nonrivalry, James Y. Stern

Notre Dame Law Review

The concept of rivalry is central to modern accounts of property. When one per-son’s use of a resource is incompatible with another’s, a system of rights to determine its use may be necessary. It is commonly asserted, however, that informational goods like inventions and expressive works are nonrivalrous and that intellectual property rights must therefore be subject to special limitation, if they should even exist at all. This Article examines the idea of rivalry more closely and makes a series of claims about the analysis of rivalrousness for purposes of such arguments. Within that frame-work, it argues that rivalry should …

Against Secondary Meaning, Jeanne C. Fromer

Notre Dame Law Review

Trademark law premises protection and scope of marks on secondary meaning, which is established when a mark develops sufficient association to consumers with a business as a source of goods or services in addition to the mark’s linguistic primary meaning. In recent years, scholars have proposed that secondary meaning plays an even more central role in trademark law than it already does. Yet enshrining secondary meaning in the law undermines the ultimate goals of trademark law: promoting fair competition and protecting consumers. The dangers of enshrining secondary meaning include the problematic doctrine that has built up to assess it or …

Beefing Up Skinny Labels: Induced Infringement As A Question Of Law, Garrett T. Potter

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note proposes a novel argument for improving the application of induced infringement by splitting its elements into separate questions of fact and law, incorporating the relevant perception and reasoning of both judge and jury. Part I provides a primer of the Hatch-Waxman Act and interactions (and lack thereof) between the USPTO and FDA in regulating pharmaceutical compositions. Part II assesses the historical landscape that led to the codification of induced infringement. Part III concludes by proposing an alternate approach by treating an element of induced infringement as a question of law, rather than a question of fact, and sets …

Copyright And The Creative Process, Mark Bartholomew

Notre Dame Law Review

Copyright is typically described as a mechanism for encouraging the production of creative works. On this view, copyright protection should be granted to genuinely creative works but denied to non-creative ones. Yet that is not how the law works. Instead, almost anything—from test answer sheets to instruction manuals to replicas of items in the public domain—is deemed creative and therefore eligible for copyright protection. This is the consequence of a century of copyright doctrine assuming that artistic creativity is incapable of measurement, unaffected by personal motivation, and incomprehensible to novices and experts alike. Recent neuroscientific research contradicts these assumptions. It …

The Injunction Function: How And Why Courts Secure Property Rights In Patents, Adam Mossoff

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay addresses one aspect of this legal and policy debate concerning remedies in patent law: how and why courts presumptively secured patent owners with injunctions against ongoing or willful infringements of their property rights. Prompted by the United States Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange, which created a new four-factor test for issuing injunctions on a finding of ongoing infringement of a valid patent, there is a growing body of scholarly commentary on the role of injunctive remedies in securing property rights in new technological innovations. Much of this commentary focuses on how eBay has resulted in …

Putting The Equity Back Into Intellectual Property Remedies, Henry E. Smith

Notre Dame Law Review

Within the realm of remedies, intellectual property remedies have presented particular difficulties, and in intellectual property law, controversy has focused on remedies. Concerns about holdup in intellectual property have even begun to lead to innovations in the law of remedies itself. Many of the difficulties and controversies raging now center around remedies that are “equitable.” In this Essay I argue that recovering a major function of equity—as meta-law— helps us understand these problems and to offer potential solutions. Meta-law is a higher order intervention when regular law fails, in contexts of high complexity and uncertainty, often stemming from polycentricity, conflicting …

Public Rights After Oil States Energy, Adam J. Macleod

Notre Dame Law Review

The concept of public rights plays an important role in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States. But as the decision in Oil States last Term revealed, the Court has often used the term to refer to three different concepts with different jurisprudential implications. Using insights drawn from historical and analytical jurisprudence, this Article distinguishes the three concepts and examines how each of them is at work in patent law. A precise reading of Oil States also bears lessons for other areas of law that implicate both private rights and duties and the administration of public, regulatory …

The Supreme Court Bar At The Bar Of Patents, Paul R. Gugliuzza

Notre Dame Law Review

Over the past two decades, a few dozen lawyers have come to dominate practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. By many accounts, these elite lawyers—whose clients are often among the largest corporations in the world—have spurred the Court to hear more cases that businesses care about and to decide those cases in favor of their clients. The Supreme Court’s recent caselaw on antitrust, arbitration, punitive damages, class actions, and more provides copious examples.

Though it is often overlooked in discussions of the emergent Supreme Court bar, patent law is another area in which the Court’s agenda has changed significantly in …

Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva E. Subotnik, Peter Dicola

Notre Dame Law Review

Intellectual property law has intended benefits, but it also carries certain costs—deliberately so. Skeptics have asked: Why should intellectual property law exist at all? To get traction on that overly broad but still important inquiry, we decided to ask a new, preliminary question: What do creators in a particular industry actually use intellectual property for? In this first-of-its-kind study, we conducted thirty-two in-depth qualitative interviews of photographers about how copyright law functions within their creative and business practices. By learning the actual functions of copyright law on the ground, we can evaluate and contextualize existing theories of intellectual property. More …

Prior Art In The District Court, Stephen Yelderman

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article is an empirical study of the evidence district courts rely upon when invalidating patents. To construct our dataset, we collected every district court ruling, verdict form, and opinion (whether reported or unreported) invalidating a patent claim over a six-and-a-half-year period. We then coded individual invalidity rulings based on the prior art supporting the court’s decision, observing 3320 invalidation events relying on 817 distinct prior art references.

The nature of the prior art relied upon to invalidate patents is relevant to two distinct sets of policy questions. First, this data sheds light on the value of district court litigation …

Clown Eggs, David Fagundes, Aaron Perzanowski

Notre Dame Law Review

Since 1946, many clowns have recorded their makeup by having it painted on eggs that are kept in a central registry in Wookey Hole, England. This tradition, which continues today, has been referred to alternately as a form of informal copyright registration and a means of protecting clowns’ property in their personae. This Article explores the Clown Egg Register and its surrounding practices from the perspective of law and social norms. In so doing, it makes several contributions. First, it contributes another chapter to the growing literature on the norms-based governance of intellectual property, showing how clowns—like comedians, roller derby …

Why Do Startups Use Trade Secrets?, David S. Levine, Ted Sichelman

Notre Dame Law Review

Empirical studies of the use of trade secrecy are scant, and those focusing on startups, nonexistent. In this Article, we present the first set of data—drawn from the Berkeley Patent Survey—on the use of trade secrets by U.S. startup companies in the software, biotechnology, medical device, and hardware industries. Specifically, we report on the prevalence of trade secrecy usage among startups. Additionally, we assess the importance of trade secrets in relation to other forms of intellectual property protection and barriers to entry, such as patents, copyrights, firstmover advantage, and complementary assets. We segment these results by a variety of factors, …

Rejecting The De Minimis Defense To Infringement Of Sound Recording Copyrights, Michael G. Kubik

Notre Dame Law Review

Part I of this Note examines the history of sound recording copyrights, the role of digital sampling in the music industry, and the basic principles and functions of the de minimis defense. Part II carefully dissects the Bridgeport and VMG opinions. Part III then considers the merits of each opinion and concludes that Bridgeport reached the correct conclusion. This argument rests on the statutory scheme of Title 17 of the U.S. Code and the plain text of its applicable provisions, bolstered by their legislative history, giving life to a unique statutory creature that thrives in a manner inconsistent with traditional …

Trademarks And Private Environmental Governance, David E. Adelman, Graeme W. Austin

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article examines the relationship between private environmental governance and trademark law. Over the past two decades, green trademarks and other forms of private governance have flourished in tandem with the retreat from national and international public law modalities of environmental regulation. The rising political opposition to environmental regulation partly accounts for this change. Also relevant is the rise of globalization, which due to jurisdictional and trade constraints has diminished the effective regulatory control countries have over products sold in their markets.

Private environmental governance is premised on consumers “voting with their wallets” by selecting products that reflect not just …

Valuing Residual Goodwill After Trademark Forfeiture, Jake Linford

Notre Dame Law Review

Trademarks contribute to an efficient market by helping consumers find products they like from sources they trust. This information-transmission function of trademarks can be upset if the law fails to reflect both how trademark owners communicate through marks and how consumers understand and use them. But many of trademark law’s forfeiture mechanisms (the ways a trademark can lose protection) ignore or discount consumer perception. This failure threatens not only to increase consumer search costs and consumer confusion, but also to distort markets.

For example, trademark protection may be forfeited when the mark owner interrupts or abandons use, even though consumers …

Internet Safe Harbors And The Transformation Of Copyright Law, Matthew Sag

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article explores the potential displacement of substantive copyright law in the increasingly important online environment. In 1998, Congress enacted a system of intermediary safe harbors as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The internet safe harbors and the associated system of notice-and-takedown fundamentally changed the incentives of platforms, users, and rightsholders in relation to claims of copyright infringement. These different incentives interact to yield a functional balance of copyright online that diverges markedly from the experience of copyright law in traditional media environments. More recently, private agreements between rightsholders and large commercial internet platforms have been made …

Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer

Notre Dame Law Review

Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has often been perplexing. Much of this difficulty arises from an unclear understanding of the nature of functionality in fashion design. This Article proposes a robust account of fashion’s function. It argues that aspects of garment designs are functional not only when they affect the physical or technological performance of a garment but also when they affect the perception of the wearer’s body. Generally, clothes are not designed or chosen simply …

(Un)Common Law Protection Of Certification Marks, Michelle B. Smit

Notre Dame Law Review

Part I of this Note defines and examines the general principles of certification marks. From that foundation, Part II provides an overview of the case law on unregistered common law certification marks. Part III analyzes the reasons why abuses of certification marks would increase under a commonlaw regime and posits that certification marks, therefore, should only exist under federal law. Finally, Part IV proposes several adjustments that should be made to the current certification mark registration system in order to address existing shortcomings that affect both consumers and third-party businesses.

Honest Copying Practices, Joseph P. Fishman

Notre Dame Law Review

One of intellectual property theory’s operating assumptions is that creating is hard while copying is easy. But it is not always so. Copies, though outwardly identical, can come from different processes, from cheap digital duplication to laborious handmade re-creation. Policymakers around the world face a choice whether such distinctions should affect liability. The two branches of intellectual property that condition liability on actual copying, copyright and trade secrecy, give different answers. Both in the United States and elsewhere, trade secrecy regimes distinguish between copying methods deemed illegitimate and those deemed legitimate, what international treaties call “honest commercial practices.” Copyright regimes, …

Raising Walls Against Overlapping Rights: Preemption And The Right Of Publicity, Rebecca Tushnet

Notre Dame Law Review

By comparing how preemption and First Amendment law have used purposive approaches to limit the right of publicity, we can see something about how boundary work in intellectual property law (IP) is done—badly, usually, with justifications that aren’t consistent or that assume that other regimes work differently than they actually do. One improvement would be to embrace categorical approaches, rather than unpredictable case-by-case balancing; both preemption and First Amendment doctrines can lend themselves to this approach. Another improvement would be to think of the First Amendment as an intellectual property regime of its own, one with general preemptive power.

Spill Your (Trade) Secrets: Knowledge Networks As Innovation Drivers, Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña

Notre Dame Law Review

Theories of intellectual property take the individual inventor or the firm as the unit of innovation. But studies in economic sociology show that in complex fields where knowledge is rapidly advancing and widely dispersed among different firms, the locus of innovation is neither an individual nor a single firm. Rather, innovative ideas originate in the informal networks of learning and collaboration that cut across firms.

Understanding innovation in this subset of industries as emerging out of networks of informal information-sharing across firms challenges traditional utilitarian theories of trade secret law—which assume trade secret protection is needed to prevent excessive private, …

Risk Regulation And Innovation: The Case Of Rights-Encumbered Biomedical Data Silos, Arti K. Rai

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article discusses whether, and how, risk and social regulation can promote socially valuable innovation. The focus is on regulation as a force for creating a data infrastructure for future innovation. This Article briefly summarizes the history of overlapping and adjacent intellectual property rights in biomedical innovation. It then discusses the manner in which the Supreme Court’s reaction to such rights concentration may exacerbate legally-encumbered diagnostic data silos. It will go on to outlines the basic history of biopharmaceutical trial data silos as well as the core legal and policy arguments in favor of increasing access to the aggregated data …

Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark P. Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn

Notre Dame Law Review

This article argues that the question of whether we should treat digital files as relevant goods is irreducibly one of policy, and it should not be reduced to mere formalism. Digital files should be treated as goods only when consumers’ interactions with the files sufficiently resemble their interactions with physical goods that they warrant the same treatment. In particular, this article argues that digital files should be treated as goods only when the origin of the files as such (not the content of those files) is material to consumers. That may turn out to be relatively rare. Indeed, this article …

The Demise Of The Functionality Doctrine In Design Patent Law, Perry J. Saidman

Notre Dame Law Review

The doctrine of functionality, in both the validity and infringement contexts, has outlived its usefulness, and analyzing it is a waste of litigants’ and judicial resources.

Territorial Overlaps In Trademark Law: The Evolving European Model, Graeme B. Dinwoodie

Notre Dame Law Review

Courts in the European Union have in a number of recent cases resisted some of the innovations of the EU system and have affirmed the enduring pull of a different conception of territoriality. This Article defends many of these acts of resistance, and supports further modifications of the EU model, in part because of the increased problem of overlapping rights. That increased overlap requires a critical reading of these innovative mechanisms and attention to a broader range of values in implementing the model. These propositions are supported both by a more theoretically complex conception of trademark territoriality and a richer …

Did Ebay Irreparably Injure Trademark Law?, Mark A. Lemley

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article argues that, while the Supreme Court's holding in eBay v. MercExchange was a good—indeed, great—development in patent and copyright law, trademark is different. The purposes of trademark law—and whom it benefits—should lead us to treat trademark injunctions differently than patent and copyright injunctions. Further, trademark courts have misinterpreted eBay, treating each of the four factors the Court enumerated as a requirement rather than a consideration. That is a particular problem in trademark law, where proof of future injury can be elusive. And perhaps most remarkably, courts have expanded eBay in trademark cases at the same time they have …

Introduction: Negotiating Ip's Boundaries In An Evolving World, Stephen Yelderman

Notre Dame Law Review

The common element of the articles that make up this Symposium Issue is a refusal to dismiss difficult questions with mechanical formality, to paper over the wrinkles that emerge when the simple models that function in the middle flounder at the edge. As this Symposium Issue will show, those wrinkles have a lot to tell us.

Strategies For Discerning The Boundaries Of Copyright And Patent Protections, Pamela Samuelson

Notre Dame Law Review

When presented with copyright claims as to seemingly ambiguous subject matters, courts and the Copyright Office have developed several different responses. The most common has been a layering or segmentation approach under which courts treat some aspects of an intellectual creation as protectable by copyright law, while other aspects may be protectable, if at all, by utility patents. But five other strategies for determining copyright and utility patent boundaries are evident in the literature, each of which has sought to preserve separate and distinct domains for copyright and utility patent protections.

Expired Patents, Trade Secrets, And Stymied Competition, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Notre Dame Law Review

Patents and trade secrecy have long been considered substitute incentives for innovation. When inventors create a new invention, they traditionally must choose between the two. And if inventors choose to patent their invention, society provides strong legal protection in exchange for disclosure, with the understanding that the protection has a limit: it expires twenty years from the date of filing. At that time, the invention is opened to the public and exposed to competition.

This story is incomplete. Patent disclosure is weak and focuses on one technical piece of an invention—but that piece is often only a part of the …

Boundaries, Extraterritoriality, And Patent Infringement Damages, Timothy R. Holbrook

Notre Dame Law Review

Patents are generally considered to be the most territorial of all the various forms of intellectual property. Even patent law, however, has confronted issues involving the application of a U.S. patent to extraterritorial activity. The Supreme Court has expressed an interest in both issues – the extraterritorial application of U.S. law and patent law. At times, these interests have intersected. Notwithstanding the Court’s recent elaborations on extraterritoriality, the approach by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has been, at best, inconsistent. At times the court has afforded extraterritorial protection, even in the face of strong territorial language …