Law Commons^™

Beyond Compulsory Licensing: Pfizer Shares Its Covid-19 Medicines With The Patent Pool, Chenglin Liu

Faculty Articles

On March 15, 2022, the United States, European Union, India, and South Africa reached an agreement on the waiver of intellectual property rights (IP rights) for COVID-19 vaccines. The waiver agreement has rekindled the debate on the balance between IP rights protection and equitable access to medicines during a public health crisis. India, South Africa, and other developing countries maintain that a waiver was the only way to make vaccines affordable and accessible. Leading pharmaceutical companies argue that the waiver will stifle innovation and make lifesaving medicines less accessible. Both sides have seemingly overlooked Pfizer's voluntary agreement with the Medicines …

The New Legal Landscape For Text Mining And Machine Learning, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Now that the dust has settled on the Authors Guild cases, this Article takes stock of the legal context for TDM research in the United States. This reappraisal begins in Part I with an assessment of exactly what the Authors Guild cases did and did not establish with respect to the fair use status of text mining. Those cases held unambiguously that reproducing copyrighted works as one step in the process of knowledge discovery through text data mining was transformative, and thus ultimately a fair use of those works. Part I explains why those rulings followed inexorably from copyright's most …

Data Protection In The European Union: A Closer Look At The Current Patchwork Of Data Protection Laws And The Proposed Reform That Could Replace Them All, Christina Glon

Faculty Articles

Laws protecting a European's right to control the flow of their own personal data (also known as "data privacy") date back as early as 1950. In the 65 years since the Council of Europe declared that every person has the fundamental "right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence," a patchwork of conventions, directives, treaties and communications have been created to ensure the ongoing protection of this right. However, in recent years, this patchwork approach has been unable to keep up with the pace of technology and has created confusion and concern for the …

Regulatory Litigation In The European Union: Does The U.S. Class Action Have A New Analogue?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

The United States has long embraced the concept of regulatory litigation, whereby individual litigants, often termed “private attorneys general,” are allowed to enforce certain public laws as a matter of institutional design. Although several types of regulatory litigation exist, the U.S. class action is often considered the paradigmatic model for this type of private regulation.

For years, the United States appeared to be the sole proponent of both regulatory litigation and large-scale litigation. However, in February 2012, the European Union dramatically reversed its existing policies toward mass claims resolution when the European Parliament adopted a resolution proposing to create a …