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Full-Text Articles in Law

Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Dec 2005

Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The history of IP/antitrust litigation is filled with exaggerated notions of the power conferred by IP rights and imagined threats to competition. The result is that antitrust litigation involving IP practices has seen problems where none existed. To be sure, finding the right balance between maintaining competition and creating incentives to innovate is no easy task. However, the judge in an IP/antitrust case almost never needs to do the balancing, most of which is done in the language of the IP provisions. The role of antitrust tribunals is the much more limited one of ensuring that any alleged threat to …


Patent Portfolios, Gideon Parchomovsky, R. Polk Wagner Nov 2005

Patent Portfolios, Gideon Parchomovsky, R. Polk Wagner

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This article presents a new theory of patent value, responding to growing empirical evidence that the traditional appropriability premise of patents is fundamentally incomplete in the modern innovation environment. We find that for patents, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: the true value of patents lies not in their individual worth, but in their aggregation into a collection of related patents, a patent portfolio. The patent portfolio theory thus explains what is known as “the patent paradox”: in recent years patent intensity—patents obtained per research and development dollar—has risen dramatically even as the expected value of …


Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman Oct 2005

Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman

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While the benchmark of trademark infringement traditionally has been a demonstration that consumers are likely to be confused by the use of a similar or identical trademark to identify the goods or services of another, a court-created doctrine called initial interest confusion allows liability for trademark infringement solely on the basis that a consumer might initially be interested, attracted, or distracted by a competitor's, or even a non-competitor's, product or service. Initial interest confusion is being used with increasing frequency, especially on the Internet, to shut down speech critical of trademark holders and their products and services, to prevent comparative …


Unilateral Refusals To License In The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Mark D. Janis, Mark A. Lemley Jun 2005

Unilateral Refusals To License In The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Mark D. Janis, Mark A. Lemley

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Most antitrust claims relating to intellectual property involve challenges to agreements, licensing practices or affirmative conduct involving the use or disposition of the intellectual property rights or the products they cover. But sometimes an antitrust claim centers on an intellectual property owner's refusal to use or license an intellectual property right, perhaps coupled with efforts to enforce the intellectual property right against infringers. The allegation may be that the intellectual property right is so essential to competition that it must be licensed across the board, or that a refusal to license it to one particular party was discriminatory, or that …


The Perfect Storm: Intellectual Property And Public Values, R. Polk Wagner Jan 2005

The Perfect Storm: Intellectual Property And Public Values, R. Polk Wagner

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This short conference paper considers how the contemporary discourse surrounding Intellectual property law (especially copyright) may be harming all concerned. That is, because of wildly divergent (and often objectively unsupportable) positions taken by both copyright owners and consumer advocates, the zone of uncertainty in the law has increased. And as uncertainty increases, both sides are hurt. The paper ends with a call for a higher level of discourse, and a query regarding whether all concerned might be better off trading rights for certainty.


Reconsidering The Dmca, R. Polk Wagner Jan 2005

Reconsidering The Dmca, R. Polk Wagner

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patents, Law and economics, prosecution history estoppel, doctrine of equivalents, ex ante, ex post, default rules, PTO, Federal Circuit, patent prosecution, patent litigation, intellectual property, patent reform, patent administration, patent office


Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2005

Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

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The well-known “access-incentives” tradeoff that lies at the heart of the standard economic analysis of copyright follows largely from the assumption that copyright turns authors into monopolists. If one instead analyzes copyright through a framework that allows for product differentiation and entry, the access-incentives tradeoff becomes less significant. By increasing producer appropriability and profit, increased copyright protection can stimulate entry of competitors producing similar works, which in turn results in lower prices, increased product variety, and increased access. This approach would also broaden set of available policy instruments, although disentangling the effects of one from another can be quite complicated.