Law Commons^™

Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A lengthy tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have ended when the Supreme Court held that the sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee seller’s rights to enforce restrictions on that article through patent infringement suits. Further, reversing the Federal Circuit, the parties cannot bargain around this rule through the seller’s specification of conditions stated at the time of sale, no matter how clear. No inquiry need be made into the patentee’s market power, anticompetitive effects, or other types of harms, whether enforcement of the condition is socially costly or …

The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …

Pledging Patents For The Public Good: Rise And Fall Of The Eco-Patent Commons, Jorge L. Contreras, Bronwyn H. Hall, Christian Helmers

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Commons and pledge structures have been used to achieve various goals of patent holders, including the advancement of social and philanthropic aims. The article analyzes the formation and structure of a widely acclaimed effort to pool patents for the promotion of green/clean technologies – the Eco-Patent Commons (EcoPC) – as well as its actual impact on technology diffusion and the factors leading to its demise in 2016. We combine quantitative econometric techniques with qualitative interviews to paint the most complete picture of this innovative and ambitious effort to date. Our quantitative results show that the patents contributed to the EcoPC …

Patent Pool Outsiders, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Individuals who decline to join cooperative groups — outsiders — raise concerns in many areas of law and policy. From trade policy to climate agreements to class action procedures, the fundamental concern is the same: a single member of the group who drops out could weaken the remaining union. This Article analyzes the outsider problem as it affects patents.

The outsider question has important bearing on patent and antitrust policy. By centralizing and simplifying complex patent licensing deals, patent pools conserve tremendous transaction costs. This allows for the widespread production and competitive sale of many useful technologies, particularly in the …

The New Separability, Lili Levi

Articles

In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the Supreme Court recently unveiled a new approach to separability. Because copyright law protects expression, not function, aesthetic features of useful articles are eligible for copyright protection only if they are separable from the functional work in which they are incorporated. But the Copyright Actdoes not define separability, and Star Athletica is the latest judicial effort to try to fill that void. Unfortunately, the new separability is open to a wide range of critiques. Relatively low-hanging fruit are the vagueness and indeterminacy of the new test, the Court's unsatisfactory attempts to avoid defining "function," …

Sovereign Patent Funds, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

No abstract provided.

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Faculty Scholarship

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, such as enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically measure …

Preserving Film Preservation From The Right Of Publicity, Christopher J. Buccafusco, Jared Vasconcellos Grubow, Ian J. Postman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Congress Considering Legislation Intended To Reverse The Recent Trend Toward Devaluation Of The Us Patent Right, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

Decisions of the United States Supreme Court spanning the last quarter of a century that have, in the aggregate, substantially devalued the patent right. The Court’s four decisions reinvigorating and substantially raising the patent eligibility bar have probably resulted in the most critical commentary, but a host of other decisions have also served to erode the patent right in multiple dimensions, including the scope of potentially patent-able subject matter as well as the strength and enforce-ability of issued patents. In 2011 Congress joined in when it enacted the America Invents Act (AIA), which includes multiple provisions tending to devalue patents, …

Osi2018 Summary Report On The 1st Summit Meeting Of The Global Open Scholarship Initiative, March 12-14, 2018, The Open Scholarship Initiative, Glenn Hampson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

When the roadmap for OSI was first being developed in 2015, our original intent was to hold a series of 10 annual meetings beginning in 2016. After the first two meetings, however, it became apparent that the next step in this process should be to pause and have just the summit group meet to formally discuss and plan out what comes next instead of having this complex conversation online (which we had been doing since mid-2017) or amongst a group of several hundred participants. This decision was also necessitated by the lack of a large enough budget to put together …

Leveraging Elsevier’S Creative Commons License Requirement To Undermine Embargoes, Josh Bolick

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution …

Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Emerging Technologies Challenging Current Legal Paradigms, W. Keith Robinson, Joshua T. Smith

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

U.S. patent law has made assumptions about where new inventions will be created, who will create them, and how they will be infringed. Throughout history, emerging technologies have challenged these paradigms. This decade’s emerging technologies will allow humans to create in virtual worlds, connect billions of every day devices via the Internet, and use artificial intelligence to invent across technology fields. If countries like the U.S. wish to encourage inventors to seek patent protection in these emerging areas, then a paradigm shift in the law must occur. Specifically, the law must clarify patent eligibility, recognize the increasing role of artificial …

The First Amendment Implications Of Copyright's Double Standard, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

Beginning with a simple question, “What’s the big deal? It’s just entertainment,” this Article argues that copyright law restricts more than just entertainment - it restricts freedom of artistic expression. Despite copyright’s facial neutrality, courts have interpreted otherwise neutral rules to subject authors to a double standard for expression. Through a series of doctrinal contradictions and hypocrisies, copyright singles out “just entertainment,” imposing greater restrictions upon the freedom of those authors relative to all other authors. By discriminating against “entertainment,” the current doctrine violates its own fundamental tenet of non-discrimination. Moreover, by selectively restricting how authors may choose to engage …

Innovation And Tradition: A Survey Of Intellectual Property And Technology Legal Clinics, Cynthia L. Dahl, Victoria F. Phillips

All Faculty Scholarship

For artists, nonprofits, community organizations and small-business clients of limited means, securing intellectual property rights and getting counseling involving patent, copyright and trademark law are critical to their success and growth. These clients need expert IP and technology legal assistance, but very often cannot afford services in the legal marketplace. In addition, legal services and state bar pro bono programs have generally been ill-equipped to assist in these more specialized areas. An expanding community of IP and Technology clinics has emerged across the country to meet these needs. But while law review articles have described and examined other sectors of …

Ip Preparedness For Outbreak Diseases, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

Outbreaks of infectious diseases will worsen, as illustrated by the recent back-to-back Ebola and Zika epidemics. The development of innovative drugs, especially in the form of vaccines, is key to minimizing future outbreaks, yet current intellectual property (IP) regimes are ineffective in supporting this goal.

IP scholarship has not adequately addressed the role of IP in the development of vaccines for outbreak diseases. This Article fills that void. Through case studies on the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks, it provides the first descriptive analysis of the role of IP from the pre- to the post-outbreak stages, specifically identifying IP inefficiencies. …

Brief Amici Curiae Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petitioner, No. 18-600, Texas Advanced Optoelectronic Solutions, Inc. V. Renesas Electronics America, Inc., Timothy R. Holbrook, Ann Bartow, Andrew Chin, David C. Hricik, Yvette Joy Liebesman, Lucas Osborn

All Faculty Scholarship

To comply with the obligations of the Uruguay Round Agreements, particularly the Agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), Congress amended 35 U.S.C. § 271(a) to make it an act of infringement to “offer to sell” a patented invention within the United States. See Uruguay Round Agreements Act, Pub. L. No. 103-465, §§ 531-533, 108 Stat. 4809 (1994).

The Federal Circuit has interpreted this provision in a manner contrary to the presumption against the extraterritorial reach of United States laws. The Federal Circuit has held that location of the ultimate sale contemplated in the offer controls the …

Critical Race Ip, Deidre Keller

Journal Publications

In this Article, written on the heels of Race + IP 2017, a conference we co-organized with Amit Basole1 and Jessica Silbey,we propose and articulate a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary movement that we call Critical Race Intellectual Property (Critical Race IP).Specifically, we argue that given trends toward maximalist intellectual property policy, it is now more important than ever to study the racial investments and implications of the laws of copyright, trademark, patent, right of publicity, trade secret, and unfair competition in a manner that draws upon Critical Race Theory (CRT). Situating our argument in a historical context, we articulate …

Teva And The Process Of Claim Construction, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

In Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., the Supreme Court addressed an oft-discussed jurisprudential disconnect between itself and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: whether patent claim construction was “legal” or “factual” in nature, and how much deference is due to district court decisionmaking in this area. In this Article, we closely examine the Teva opinion and situate it within modern claim construction jurisprudence. Our thesis is that the Teva holding is likely to have only very modest effects on the incidence of deference to district court claim construction but that for unexpected reasons the …

Liability For Providing Hyperlinks To Copyright-Infringing Content: International And Comparative Law Perspectives, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

Hyperlinking, at once an essential means of navigating the Internet, but also a frequent means to enable infringement of copyright, challenges courts to articulate the legal norms that underpin domestic and international copyright law, in order to ensure effective enforcement of exclusive rights on the one hand, while preserving open communication on the Internet on the other. Several recent cases, primarily in the European Union, demonstrate the difficulties of enforcing the right of communication to the public (or, in U.S. copyright parlance, the right of public performance by transmission) against those who provide hyperlinks that effectively deliver infringing content to …

Greeted With A Shrug: The Impact Of The Community Design System On United States Law, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

In an era of increased harmonization of intellectual property laws worldwide, the United States’ treatment of product design looks like an anomaly. Since the European Community Design System went into effect in 2002, advocates in the US have urged Congress to follow suit and adopt sui generis design protection, particularly for fashion. The US Congress, however, has resisted the call and left design protection to the existing standards of trademark, copyright and design patent law.

This Chapter explores some of the reasons that the Community Design System has had so little purchase in US debates over design. The rejection of …

Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts – principally trespass and negligence – in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property – and harm-based torts – has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant’s volitional actions interfere with a …

Intellectual Property As Seen By Barbie And Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship Of Copyright And Trademark Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Some years ago, caselaw on trademark parodies and similar unauthorized “speech” uses of trademarks could have led one to conclude that the law had no sense of humor. Over time, however, courts in the US and elsewhere began to leaven likelihood of confusion analyses with healthy skepticism regarding consumers’ alleged inability to perceive a joke. These decisions did not always expressly cite the copyright fair use defense, but the considerations underlying the copyright doctrine seemed to inform trademark analysis as well. The spillover effect may indeed have been inevitable, as several of the cases in which the fair use defense …

Bigger And Better Patent Examiner Statistics, Shine Tu

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The American government charges the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) with reading and reviewing patent applications to determine what new or improved inventions, machines, and processes qualify for patent protection. Each application is reviewed by a specific patent examiner who theoretically applies the standards of patentability in an even, fair, unbiased and consistent manner. This task requires the examiner to not only be internally consistent with the applications she reviews but also consistent with the behavior of other examiners within the same technology center. I have conducted two studies based on data from hundreds of thousands of patents, …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Invention Of A Slave, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On June 10, 1858, the Attorney General issued an opinion titled Invention of a Slave, concluding that a slave owner could not patent a machine invented by his slave, because neither the slave owner nor his slave could take the required patent oath. The slave owner could not swear to be the inventor, and the slave could not take an oath at all. The Patent Office denied at least two patent applications filed by slave owners, one of which was filed by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who later became the President of the Confederate States of America. But …

Registration Is Fundamental, Brian L. Frye, Nicole E. Pottinger

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Under the Copyright Act, copyright owners can file infringement actions only if registration of their copyright claim with the Copyright Office “has been made” or “has been refused.” The United States Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com, in order to decide whether registration is “made” when a claimant files a registration application or when the Copyright Office registers the claim.

This article argues that the Court should hold that registration occurs when the Copyright Office registers the claim, in order to ensure that federal courts can benefit from the expertise of the Copyright Office. The Copyright …

Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Design stands out among intellectual property subject matter in terms of the extent of overlapping protection available. Different forms of intellectual property usually protect different aspects of a product. In the design context, however, precisely the same features are often subject to design patent, trademark, and copyright protection-and parties commonly claim more than one of those forms. Yet, as we show, the claiming regimes of these three forms of design protection differ in significant ways: the timing of claims; claim format (particularly whether the claims are visual or verbal); the multiplicity of claims (whether and how one can make multiple …

Reaching For Mediocrity: Competition And Stagnation In Pharmaceutical Innovation, Son Le, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patents might incentivize invention but they do not guarantee firms will invest in projects that maximize social utility. We model how risk-neutral firms’ ability to obtain substantial private returns on marginal new technologies causes them to “reach for mediocrity” by investing in socially-suboptimal projects, even in the presence of competition and new entrants. Focusing primarily on pharmaceutical innovation, we analyze various policy interventions to solve this underinvestment problem. In particular, we describe a new approach to patents – a value based patent system, which ties patent protection to the underlying invention’s social value – and show how it incentivizes socially-optimal …

Standing With A Bundle Of Sticks: The All Substantial Rights Doctrine In Action, Christopher J. Morten

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides an overview of the Federal Circuit’s all substantial rights doctrine. Surveying decades of case law, this Article seeks to clarify this confusing area of the law and set out the essential rules for those engaged in patent licensing, patent assignment, and patent litigation. This Article begins by explaining why effective ownership of a patent is critical to standing, and then describes the framework through which courts determine whether a party is, in fact, in possession of all substantial rights and is therefore the effective owner. While there are many factors that courts may consider, certain rights take …