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Special Project: Current Issues In Intellectual Property, W. Russell Taber

Vanderbilt Law Review

A single legal concept has produced some of the greatest achievements of the human mind: intellectual property. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle denounced the then novel notion of rewarding those who create inventions beneficial to the state. History has been kind to Aristotle, but not because of his insights on intellectual property. The Venetian Senate's passage of the 1474 Act marked the beginning of systematic patent protection on European soil. Along with blown glassware, Venice later exported its penchant for patent protection to the rest of Europe, including Great Britain by the mid- sixteenth century. During the same era, the …

Copyright Infringement And Poetry: When Is A Red Wheelbarrow The Red Wheelbarrow?, Jennifer Understahl

Vanderbilt Law Review

Copyright does not protect facts or ideas, but only an author's original expression. Often, though, it is difficult to distill protected expression from unprotected ideas or facts that reside in the public domain. Copyright protection for poetry is particularly problematic because a poem's ideas are often intertwined with a poem's sounds, shape, and images. It is often not only difficult to extract ideas from a poem's surface, but once ideas are "discovered," it may even be difficult to articulate exactly what these main ideas or themes are. William Carlos Williams' poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, one of the most famous twentieth …

Introduction: Special Project - Current Issues In Intellectual Property, W. Russell Taber

Vanderbilt Law Review

A single legal concept has produced some of the greatest achievements of the human mind: intellectual property. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle denounced the then novel notion of rewarding those who create inventions beneficial to the state. History has been kind to Aristotle, but not because of his insights on intellectual property. The Venetian Senate's passage of the 1474 Act marked the beginning of systematic patent protection on European soil. Along with blown glassware, Venice later exported its penchant for patent protection to the rest of Europe, including Great Britain by the mid- sixteenth century. During the same era, the …

Protecting The Frontiers Of Biotechnology Beyond The Genome: The Limits Of Patent Law In The Face Of The Proteomics Revolution, J. Jason Williams

Vanderbilt Law Review

Scientific knowledge and invention rapidly accelerated in the past few decades, resulting in an untold number of broken barriers and realized benefits. In 2001, scientists announced that the human genome, consisting of 30,000 to 40,000 genes, had been fully characterized. Arguably one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history, this accomplishment came far sooner than anyone could have anticipated. Fueled by the enormous marketing potential in finding causes and cures for many diseases, the biotechnology industry invested heavily in the project with the hope of maximizing control of genetic intellectual property and its potential downstream value.

While the genomic …

Traditional Knowledge & Intellectual Property: A Trips-Compatible Approach, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Should intellectual property provide a means for strengthening the range of incentives that local communities need for conserving and developing genetic resources and traditional knowledge (TK)? If so, how and at what cost? To be able to suggest answers, a number of issues must be resolved. They are the focus of the Article. First, one must build, and then cross, a cultural bridge to explain current forms of intellectual property to holders of traditional knowledge, including definitional efforts to determine the nature and depth of the overlap(s). This achieves a dual objective: it allows intellectual property circles to understand and …

Intellectual Property, Trade & Development: The State Of Play, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article considers, first, available economic, social, and cultural analyses of the impact of intellectual property protection in developing countries. Economics provides a useful set of analytical tools and are directly relevant, in particular since the successfully arranged marriage of IP and trade rules after which it became inevitable that IP rules would be measured using an economic yardstick. The Paper also considers the claim that making proper intellectual property policy is impossible or inherently unreliable because theoretical models are inadequate or valid empirical data unavailable. Against this backdrop, the Article then examines the emergence of the World Trade Organization …