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Full-Text Articles in Law
Knowledge Commons: The Case Of The Biopharmaceutical Industry, Arti K. Rai
Knowledge Commons: The Case Of The Biopharmaceutical Industry, Arti K. Rai
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Synthetic Biology: Caught Between Property Rights, The Public Domain, And The Commons, Arti K. Rai, James Boyle
Synthetic Biology: Caught Between Property Rights, The Public Domain, And The Commons, Arti K. Rai, James Boyle
Faculty Scholarship
Synthetic biologists aim to make biology a true engineering discipline. In the same way that electrical engineers rely on standard capacitors and resistors, or computer programmers rely on modular blocks of code, synthetic biologists wish to create an array of modular biological parts that can be readily synthesized and mixed together in different combinations. Synthetic biology has already produced important results, including more accurate AIDS tests and the possibility of unlimited supplies of previously scarce drugs for malaria. Proponents hope to use synthetic organisms to produce not only medically relevant chemicals but also a large variety of industrial materials, including …
Synthetic Biology: The Intellectual Property Puzzle, Arti K. Rai, Sapna Kumar
Synthetic Biology: The Intellectual Property Puzzle, Arti K. Rai, Sapna Kumar
Faculty Scholarship
Synthetic biology, which operates at the intersection of biotechnology and information technology, has the potential to raise, in a particularly acute manner, the intellectual property problems that exist in both fields. A preliminary patent landscape reveals problematic foundational patents that could, if licensed and enforced inappropriately, impede the potential of the technology. The landscape also reveals a proliferation of patents on basic synthetic biology "parts" that could create transaction cost heavy patent thickets. Both foundational patents and patent thickets are likely to be particularly problematic to the extent they read on standards that synthetic biologists would like to establish. Synthetic …
“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk
“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk
Faculty Scholarship
A legal ideology emerged in the 1870s that celebrated contract as the body of law with the particular purpose of facilitating the formation of productive exchanges that would enrich the parties to the contract and, therefore, society as a whole. Across the spectrum of intellectual property, courts used the legal fiction of implied contract, and a version of it particularly emphasizing liberty of contract, to shift control of workplace knowledge from skilled employees to firms while suggesting that the emergence of hierarchical control and loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for creative workers was consistent with the free labor ideology that dominated …