Law Commons^™

A Jukebox For Patents: Can Patent Licensing Of Incremental Inventions Be Controlled By Compulsory Licensing?, Ralph D. Clifford

Faculty Publications

The patent system today no longer follows the classic understanding of how it is designed to work. In theory, to avoid infringement, a product developer searches the database of issued patents looking for those that might read onto the product being developed. If such patents are found, the developer can approach the patent holder for a license, can attempt to design around the claims, or can abandon the project. With many hundreds of thousands of patents being issued annually—a rate of issuance almost an order of magnitude larger than a hundred years ago—it is now a practical impossibility to search …

The Interaction Of Exhaustion And The General Law, Aaron K. Perzanowski, Ariel Katz, Guy A. Rub

Faculty Publications

In Statutory Domain and the Commercial Law of Intellectual Property, John Duffy and Richard Hynes argue that IP exhaustion — the doctrine that limits a patentee’s or copyright holder’s control over goods in the stream of commerce — was created and functions exclusively to confine IP law within its own domain and prevent it from displacing other laws.

In this essay, we explain why we are not persuaded. A central theme in Duffy and Haynes work is the argument that the common law did not play a role in the emergence and development of exhaustion. However, we show that the …

Branding Taxation, Jeffrey A. Maine, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Faculty Publications

Branding is important not only to businesses,but also to the economy. The intellectual property laws and tax laws should thus further the legitimate goals of encouraging and protecting brand investments while maintaining a sound tax base. Intellectual property protections for branding depend on advertisement and enforcement, both of which demand significant amounts of private investment by firms. Although one would expect similar tax treatments of both categories of investment, the categories are actually treated as vastly different for federal income tax purposes. Additionally, tax distinctions also exist within each category. The result is that some branding investments are expensed and …

The Author Was Not An Author: The Copyright Interests Of Photographic Subjects From Wilde To Garcia, Eva Subotnik

Faculty Publications

Toward the end of his dissent in Garcia v. Google, Judge Alex Kozinski remarked that “[w]hen modern works, such as films or plays, are produced, contributors will often create separate, copyrightable works as part of the process.” Judge Kozinski’s characterization of plays (or even films) as “modern works” opens the door to an examination of that claim with respect to another genre of modern work: the photograph. This essay focuses on the treatment of claimed authorial contributions by photographic subjects to the photographs in which they are portrayed. It traces the analysis of this issue from the early photography cases …