Law Commons^™

State Accountability For Violations Of Intellectual Property Rights: How To “Fix” Florida Prepaid (And How Not To), Ernest A. Young, Mitchell N. Berman, R. Anthony Reese

Faculty Scholarship

In its Florida Prepaid and College Savings Bank decisions of two terms ago, the Supreme Court raised significant barriers to Congress's ability to subject the states to damages liability in federal intellectual property suits. These decisions provoked extensive academic commentary and have also sparked efforts in Congress and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to amend the federal intellectual property laws to ensure that state governments will remain accountable for violations of federal rights. This article explores how such legislation might best be shaped in order to withstand constitutional challenge.

Satisfactory treatment of the issue requires examination of a …

Designing Non-National Systems: The Case Of The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, Laurence R. Helfer, Graeme B. Dinwoodie

Faculty Scholarship

The article critically assesses the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) as a potential model for solving the immense legal challenges presented by transborder activity. Inaugurated in late 1999 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the UDRP creates a fast, inexpensive online mechanism for trademark owners to recapture domain names held by persons who, in bad faith, register and use domain names that are confusingly similar to those marks. At present, the UDRP applies only to a narrow segment of disputes between trademark owners and domain name registrants. But the UDRP has been heralded by …

International Dispute Settlement At The Trademark-Domain Name Interface, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay identifies some of the emerging legal issues relating to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP"), a new anational online dispute settlement system established by a private, non-profit corporation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in late 1999.

The UDRP creates a fast and inexpensive mechanism for trademark owners to recapture domain names held by persons who, in bad faith, register and use domain names that are confusingly similar to those marks. The UDRP is worthy of serious study for at least two reasons. First and foremost, the process by which the UDRP was created, …