Law Commons^™

U.S. Supreme Court I.P. Cases, 1810-2019: Measuring & Mapping The Citation Networks, Joseph S. Miller

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Intellectual property law in the United States, though shaped by key statutes, has long been a common-law field to a great degree. Many decades of decisional law flesh out the meaning of broad-textured, sparely worded statutes. Given the key roles of patent law and copyright law, both federal, the Supreme Court of the United States is i.p. law’s leading apex court. What are the major topical currents in the Supreme Court’s i.p. cases, both now and over the course of the Court’s work? This study uses network-analysis tools to measure and map the entirety of the Court’s i.p. jurisprudence. It …

Law's Semantic Self-Portrait: Discerning Doctrine With Co-Citation Networks And Keywords, Joseph S. Miller

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An apex court’s body of cases has an internal texture, continually augmented by recent citations to earlier, topically related cases. How can we best describe that texture? The citation network shows a path. Specifically, what past Supreme Court cases do more recent Supreme Court cases tend to cite together, as if a topical pair? Using a web of those oft-cited pairs, what noun phrases appear in a given cluster of cases more often, relative to the rate at which those phrases appear in writings more generally? To answer these questions is to map, in detail, a body of decisional law. …

Code Revision Commission V. Public.Resource.Org And The Fight Over Copyright Protection For Annotations And Commentary, David E. Shipley

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This article is about the Eleventh Circuit’s 2018 decision in Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org concerning the public edicts doctrine and holding that the State of Georgia’s copyright on the annotations, commentary and analyses in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is invalid. About a third of the States claim copyright in the annotations to their codes so the potential impact of this decision is substantial. The U.S. Supreme Court granted Georgia’s petition for a writ of certiorari on Monday, June 24.

The article’s thesis is that the Eleventh Circuit was wrong and should be reversed. It first discusses the …

Brandeis’S I.P. Federalism: Thoughts On Erie At Eighty, Joseph S. Miller

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Justice Brandeis is, in intellectual property law’s precincts, most famous for his lone dissent in International News Service v. Associate Press, the misappropriation case one can find in virtually every i.p. survey casebook (and many property law casebooks as well). But in the wider legal world, Brandeis is likely most famous for his earthquake opinion in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins. Do Brandeis’s opinions in these two cases speak to each other? Can considering them together inform broader reflections on the texture of our federalism in the i.p. context? This piece, prepared in connection with an “Erie at Eighty” conference …

Derivative Works And Making Sense Of The Maxim That 'Others Are Free To Copy The Original. They Are Not Free To Copy The Copy.', David E. Shipley

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This is a paper about some of the most entertaining and challenging cases in America’s copyright law jurisprudence concerning derivative works as copyrightable subject matter, and the closely related right to prepare derivative works. The cases are entertaining because they involve very familiar works of authorship, and they are challenging because the rulings are often difficult to reconcile due to the fact that the courts are grappling with copyright’s elusive originality standard as applied to derivative works as well the copyright owner’s right to prepare derivative works. Instead of attempting to say something ‘original’ about originality, my goal for this …

A Transformative Use Taxonomy: Making Sense Of The Transformative Use Standard, David E. Shipley

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The transformative use standard, which is an important aspect of copyright law’s fair use doctrine, has been confusing and uncertain since 1994 when it was first introduced by the United States Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music. To try to make some sense of this standard, this article extends the work of several scholars who have argued that the massive amount of fair use case law generally divides itself into categories, patterns or policy clusters which have their own internal coherence. This article contends that these observations apply as well to transformative use decisions more particularly, which similarly fit …

Which Supreme Court Cases Influenced Recent Supreme Court Ip Decisions? A Citation Study, Joseph S. Miller

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The U.S. Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of intellectual property cases — especially patent cases — over the last several terms. Which prior cases influence the stated reasoning in these recent Supreme Court IP cases? A handful of citation studies of supreme courts in the U.S., both state and federal, conducted over the last 40 years suggest that the Court would most often cite its own prior cases; that it would cite its more recent cases more often than its older cases; and that a small number of its prior cases would receive a large share of the …

Droit De Suite, Copyright’S First Sale Doctrine And Preemption Of State Law, David E. Shipley

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The primary focus of this article is whether California’s forty-year old droit de suite statute; the California Resale Royalty Act (CRRA), is subject to federal preemption under the Copyright Act. This issue is now being litigated in the Ninth Circuit, and this article concludes that the CRRA is preempted under section 301(a) of the Copyright Act and under the Supremacy Clause because it at odds with copyright’s well-established first sale doctrine.

The basic idea of droit de suite is that each time an artist’s work is resold by a dealer or auction house, the artist is entitled to a royalty, …

Reasonable Certainty & Corpus Linguistics: Judging Definiteness After Nautilus & Teva, Joseph S. Miller

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In Nautilus (2014), the Supreme Court held “that a patent is invalid for indefiniteness if its claims...fail to inform, with reasonable certainty, those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention.” We don’t require perfect clarity because, as Festo (2002) highlights, patentees can’t achieve it. We don’t launch a post hoc judicial salvage operation to rescue slipshod text because, as the functional-claiming cases from the 1930s and 1940s highlight, others can’t adequately plan around it. Reasonably certain notice, then, is just right: § 112 “require[s] that a patent’s claims, viewed in light of the specification and prosecution history, …

Abercrombie 2.0 - Can We Get There From Here? The Thoughts On 'Suggestive Fair Use', Joseph S. Miller

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Professor Linford, unlike Caesar’s Antony, seeks not only to bury Abercrombie, but to praise it, at least in part. Using linguistic evidence, both historical and experimental, he would relocate a bobbled boundary—from the descriptive–suggestive transition to the suggestive–arbitrary transition—and thereby establish a reformed template for sorting word marks according to their source-signifying strength. The basic difference between acquired and inherent distinctiveness not only remains in Linford’s account, however; it draws new strength from insights about semantic change. Behold, Abercrombie 2.0! His recent article, which is both provocative and engaging, continues the reconstructive work Linford began in his critique of …

Discouraging Frivolous Copyright Infringement Claims: Fee Shifting Under Rule 11 Or 28 U.S.C. § 1927 As An Alternative To Awarding Attorney's Fees Under Section 505 Of The Copyright Act, David E. Shipley

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The United States Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons resolved a disagreement over when it is appropriate to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant under section 505 of the Copyright Act, and ended a perceived venue advantage for losing plaintiffs in some jurisdictions. The Court ruled unanimously that courts are correct to give substantial weight to the question of whether the losing side had a reasonable case to fight, but that the objective reasonableness of that side’s position does not give rise to a presumption against fee shifting. It made clear that other factors …

The Empty Promise Of Vara: The Restrictive Application Of A Narrow Statute, David E. Shipley

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The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) was enacted by Congress in 1990 in order to bring our laws into compliance with Article 6bis of the Berne Convention and to acknowledge that protecting moral rights will foster “a climate of artistic worth and honor that encourages the author in the arduous act of creation.” The passage of this legislation is said to show Congress’s “belief that the art covered by the Act ‘meet[s] a special societal need, and [its] protection and preservation serves an important public interest.’”

Notwithstanding these lofty statements about artistic worth, honor and encouraging creation, VARA is a …

Error Costs & Ip Law, Joseph S. Miller

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A court in doubt about an ip statute’s scope can err in two ways. It can wrongly narrow the ip right’s reach, or wrongly broaden it. The latter error, however, is worse: A wrongly broadened ip statute effectively creates new property. To correct erroneous broadening, unlike erroneous narrowing, the legislature must thus eliminate a now-established property right. And that is very hard to do. Courts cannot, of course, avoid making at least some mistakes. Courts can, however, prefer the mistakes that are easier, not harder, for the legislature to correct. This essay explores this error-cost-based approach to ip statutes, as …

A Numerus Clausus Principle For Intellectual Property, Christina Mulligan

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Real property can only be held and conveyed in a small number of forms, such as fee simple, life estate, and lease. This principle is known as numerus clausus, meaning “the number is closed.” For centuries, the principle has been central to the common-law system of property rights. Scholars have justified it as a mechanism for facilitating effective property alienation, maintaining low transaction costs in the buying and selling of property, and keeping the scope of property owners’ rights clear.

In contrast, the numerus clausus principle is essentially nonexistent in intellectual property law. In the context of patents and copyrights, …

Scaling The Patent System, Christina Mulligan, Timothy B. Lee

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Why do firms in some industries ignore patents when developing new products? This paper posits a simple but novel answer to this long-puzzling question: firms ignore patents because they are unable to discover the patents their activities might infringe. The costs of finding relevant patents, which we call discovery costs, are prohibitively high.

Not all industries face high patent discovery costs. Chemical patents are "indexable," meaning that relevant patents can be efficiently retrieved by chemical formula. As a result, discovery costs in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are low, and inadvertent infringement by firms in these industries is rare. But …

A Dangerous Undertaking Indeed: Juvenile Humor, Raunchy Jokes, Obscene Materials And Bad Taste In Copyright, David E. Shipley

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Some of the most important statements in our nation’s rich copyright jurisprudence were written by Justice Holmes over a century ago in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co.,a case holding that circus posters were entitled to copyright protection.

In Bleistein, Justice Holmes stated that “[i]t would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of [writings, illustrations, music and other forms of expression] outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits.” This announced what has been called the principle of “aesthetic non-discrimination.

“Pull My Finger Fred,” and many other …

The Burden Of Knowledge, Christian Turner

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Sometimes we are better off not knowing things. While we often hear that "ignorance is bliss," there has not been a comprehensive consideration in the legal academy of the virtues of ignorance and its regulation. Though the distribution of knowledge, like the distribution of other goods, is affected both directly and indirectly by law, several characteristics of knowledge distinguish it from other kinds of property. Much has been written about the impact of the nonrival and nonexclusive nature of knowledge on its production and distribution. This Article centers around two other attributes of knowledge that combine to create a special …

Level Of Skill And Long-Felt Need: Notes On A Forgotten Future, Joe Miller

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The Supreme Court's KSR decision transforms the way we think about patent law's ordinary artisan. The ordinary artisan, the Supreme Court states, is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton. This transformation, which sweeps aside a contrary precept that had informed the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence for a generation, raises a key question: How do we fill out the rest of our conception, in a given case, of the ordinary artisan's level of skill at the time the invention was made? Reaching back to a large vein of case law typified by Judge Learned Hand's decisions about nonobviousness, …

Enhancing Patent Disclosure For Faithful Claim Construction, Joe Miller

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Claim construction jurisprudence is in disarray. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reverses trial court claim construction decisions at a worryingly high rate. The proportion of Federal Circuit claim construction opinions that include separate concurrences or dissents continues to grow. And the muddled mix of issues the Federal Circuit framed for en banc review in the Phillips case suggests that the court is having trouble reaching consensus on what the central questions are, much less on how to answer them. Perhaps the path to adequately predictable claim construction is continued tinkering with the analytical constructs internal to …

Building A Better Bounty: Litigation-Stage Rewards For Defeating Patents, Joe Miller

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A patent challenger who defeats a patent wins a prize that it must share with the whole world, including all its competitors. This forced sharing undermines an alleged infringer's reason for fighting the patent case to the finish - especially if the patent owner offers an attractive settlement. Too many settlements, and too few definitive patent challenges, are the result. A litigation-stage bounty would correct this defect in patent litigation's basic framework, for it would provide cash prizes to successful patent challengers that they alone would enjoy. After briefly describing the free rider problem with inventions that patent law attempts …

Copyright Protection For Architectural Works, David E. Shipley

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Architecture is the most commonly experienced and pervasive of all the arts. The creative efforts of architects culminate in structures used for shelter, pleasure, business, entertainment, and transportation.1 Architects express their design concepts in sketches, elevations, floor plans, working drawings, specifications, renditions, and three-dimensional models. Their labors in shaping the ideas for a building from rough conceptions into plans and then into completed structures are similar to the efforts of other creators. An architect is as much an author as is a sculptor or a dramatist. His plans, renditions, and the resulting structure will ordinarily show originality and will reflect …