Law Commons^™

Intergenerational Progress, Brett Frischmann, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Essay prepared for the Wisconsin Law Review’s symposium on Intergenerational Equity lays the groundwork for a broader understanding of the goals of IP law in the United States by arguing that there is room for a normative commitment to intergenerational justice. First, we argue that the normative basis for IP laws need not be utilitarianism. The Constitution does not require that we conceive of IP in utilitarian terms or that we aim only to promote efficiency or maximize value. To the contrary, the IP Clause leaves open a number of ways to conceive of Progress; courts’ and scholars’ overwhelming …

Symposium: Creativity And The Law: Introduction, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

Creativity is on the American mind. President Obama routinely suggests that creativity and ingenuity are the keys to America's economic future. Bill Gates emphasizes the power of creativity to solve the world's most pressing, and most difficult, problems. 2 But the creativity story is, of late, usually bleakly told: indeed, a recent Newsweek cover story proclaimed a "Creativity Crisis." Last November, a group of twelve academics gathered at the Notre Dame Law School to consider law's role in this story. What is creativity, and how does it map onto legal concepts like originality, novelty, or non-obviousness? What should law, and …

International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

Commentators have long recognized the need to coordinate questions at the patent-antitrust intersection with other policy levers available under patent law. In the international context, however, control over patent policy has been fractured and entrusted to diverse decisionmakers. Many details of patent law are tightly coordinated by international agreement, while others related to antitrust are left to national discretion. This Article evaluates the consequences of this fracture, and notes ways in which the prevailing treaty regimes (the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement) distort incentives for national policymaking. National discretion at the patent-antitrust intersection can be expected to result in …

Rules For Growth: Promoting Innovation And Growth Through Legal Reform, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Robert E. Litan, Yochai Benkler, Henry N. Butler, John Henry Clippinger, Robert Cook-Deegan, Robert D. Cooter, Aaron S. Edlin, Ronald J. Gilson, Oliver R. Goodenough, Gillian K. Hadfield, Mark A. Lemley, Frank Partnoy, George L. Priest, Larry E. Ribstein, Charles F. Sabel, Peter H. Schuck, Hal S. Scott, Robert E. Scott, Alex Stein, Victoria Stodden, John E. Tyler Iii, Alan D. Viard, Benjamin Wittes

Journal Articles

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of sustaining growth both in the short and long runs. In response to this challenge, the Kauffman Foundation convened a number of America’s leading legal scholars and social scientists during the summer of 2010 to present and discuss their ideas for changing legal rules and policies to promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth. This meeting led to the publication …

Probabilistic Knowledge Of Third-Party Trademark Infringement, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This essay views secondary trademark liability in light of tort law’s treatment of parties whose actions expose a plaintiff to third party-wrongdoing. Broadly speaking, tort law imposes liability on a party for contributing to the tortious activity of another in two different ways. In vicarious and accomplice liability cases, courts impose the same liability on the defendant as they would have on the direct tortfeasors, had they been defendants: if the third-party wrongdoer is a batterer, the defendant is liable for battery. Another line of cases imposes liability for unreasonably putting a defendant at risk of third-party wrongdoing, and these …

Strategic Spillovers, Daniel B. Kelly

Journal Articles

The conventional problem with externalities is well known: Parties often generate harm as an unintended byproduct of using their property. This Article examines situations in which parties may generate harm purposely, in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting. Such “strategic spillovers” have received relatively little attention, but the problem is a perennial one. From the “livery stable scam” in Chicago to “pollution entrepreneurs” in China, parties may engage in externality-generating activities they otherwise would not have undertaken, or increase the level of harm given that they are engaging in such activities, to profit through bargaining or subsidies. This …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellant/Cross-Appellee New Life Art, Inc. And Daniel A. Moore And Affirmance In Part, Mark Mckenna, Michael T. Sansbury

Court Briefs

The District Court properly held that New Life Art’s (“New Life”) creative works do not infringe the University of Alabama’s (“the University”) rights in the trade dress of its football uniforms, including the their crimson and white colors. First, New Life’s realistic depiction of the University’s football games is not likely to confuse consumers about the source of New Life’s goods, or as to the University’s sponsorship of or affiliation with those goods. Confusion is actionable under the Lanham Act only when it relates to these types of source relationships, and not when consumers merely recognize the plaintiff’s mark. Second, …

An Alternate Approach To Channeling?, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

Intellectual property law has developed a variety of doctrines to police the boundaries between various forms of protection. Courts and scholars alike overwhelmingly conceive of these doctrines in terms of the nature of the objects of protection. The functionality doctrine in trademark law, for example, defines the boundary between trademark and patent law by identifying and refusing trademark protection to features that play a functional role in a product’s performance. Likewise, the useful article doctrine works at the boundary of copyright and patent law to identify elements of an article’s design that are dictated by function and to channel protection …

Testing Modern Trademark Law's Theory Of Harm, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Modern scholarship takes a decidedly negative view of trademark law. Commentators rail against doctrinal innovations like dilution and initial interest confusion. They clamor for clearer and broader defenses. And they plead for greater First Amendment scrutiny of various applications of trademark law. But beneath all of this criticism lies overwhelming agreement that consumer confusion is harmful. This easy acceptance of the harmfulness of confusion is a problem because it operates at too high a level of generality, ignoring important differences between types of relationships about which consumers might be confused. Failure to differentiate between these different relationships has enabled trademark …

Teaching Trademark Theory Through The Lens Of Distinctiveness, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the annual teaching edition of the Saint Louis University Law Journal encourages teachers to begin trademark law courses using the concept of distinctiveness as a vehicle for articulating producer and consumer perspectives in trademark law. Viewing the law through these sometimes different perspectives helps in approaching a variety of doctrines in trademark law, and both perspectives are relatively easy to grasp in the context of distinctiveness.

Refusals To Deal With Competitors By Owners Of Patents And Copyrights: Reflections On The Image Technical And Xerox Decisions, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Under the patent and copyright laws, the owner of a patent for an invention or of a copyright for a work has the right to sell, license or transfer it, to exploit it individually and exclusively, or even to decide to withhold it from the public. By contrast, under the antitrust laws, a unilateral refusal to deal may constitute an element of a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and the courts may then impose a duty on the violator to deal with others, including possibly with its actual or would-be competitors.

The central question addressed by this …

Intellectual Property, Privatization And Democracy: A Response To Professor Rose, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

The broad thesis of Professor Rose's article Privatization: The Road to Democracy? is an important reminder that no institution deserves all the credit for democratization, and that the success of any particular institution in promoting democracy depends to a greater or lesser extent on the existence and functioning of other political institutions. While protection of private property has proven quite important to successful democratic reform, we should not be lulled into thinking private property can carry the whole weight of reform. That lesson has particular significance in the context of intellectual property, given proponents general tendency to overstate the significance …

The Rehnquist Court And The Groundwork For Greater First Amendment Scrutiny Of Intellectual Property, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the Washington University School of Law conference on the Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment addresses the Rehnquist Court's view of the role of the First Amendment in intellectual property cases. It argues that, while the Rehnquist Court was not eager to find a conflict between intellectual property laws and the First Amendment, there is reason to believe that it set the stage for greater First Amendment scrutiny of intellectual property protections. At the very least, the Court left that road open to future courts, which might be inclined to view intellectual property more skeptically.

The Right Of Publicity And Autonomous Self-Definition, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

Legal protection against unauthorized commercial uses of an individual's identity has grown significantly over the last fifty years as it has relentlessly pursued economic value. It was forced to focus on value because a false distinction between the harms suffered by private citizens and celebrities seemingly left celebrities without a privacy claim for commercial use of their identities. But the normative case for awarding individuals the economic value of their identity is weak, since celebrities do not need additional incentive to invest in either their native skill or in developing a persona. Still, while the prevailing justification is inadequate, as …

Defending Cyberproperty, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

This Article explores how the law should treat legal claims by owners of Internet-connected computer systems to enjoin unwanted uses of their systems. Over the last few years, this question has become increasingly urgent and controversial, as system owners have sought protection from unsolicited commercial e-mail and from robots that extract data from Web servers for competitive purposes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, courts utilizing a wide range of legal doctrines upheld claims by network resource owners to prevent unwanted access to their computer networks. The vast weight of legal scholarship has voiced strong opposition to these cyberproperty …

Incentives To Create Under A "Lifetime-Plus-Years" Copyright Duration: Lessons From A Behavioral Economic Analysis For Eldred V. Ashcroft, Avishalom Tor, Dotan Oliar

Journal Articles

In this Article, we highlight for the first time some of the significant but hitherto unrecognized behavioral effects of copyright law on individuals' incentives to create and then examine the implications of our findings for the constitutional analysis of Eldred v. Ashcroft. We show that behavioral biases - namely, individuals' optimistic bias regarding their future longevity and their sub-additive judgments in circumstances resembling the extant rule of copyright duration - explain the otherwise puzzling lifetime-plus-years basis for copyright protection given to individual authors, and reveal how this regime provides superior incentives to create. Thus, insofar as the provision of increased …