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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Law
Death Of Copyright, Paul Gugliuzza
Death Of Copyright, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
The four primary bodies of intellectual property law—patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and the law of trade secrets—address the question of duration in different ways. Trade secrets have no fixed duration; the law protects against misappropriation as long as the relevant information remains secret. Trademark protection lasts as long as the mark retains its capacity to distinguish the goods or services it is attached to. In patent law—my primary area of scholarship—duration is fixed, finite, and generally straightforward to determine: you get twenty years from the date you file your patent application. Copyright duration, by contrast, varies depending on …
Right Of Repair In The Digital Economy, Jessica Silbey
Right Of Repair In The Digital Economy, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
We have long understood that people have a right to repair what they own, but this right to repair is under siege. A new article by Leah Chan Grinvald and Ofer Tur-Sinai explains how IP rules are inhibiting these repair rights and why laws protecting the right to repair are necessary and justifiable. As I explain below, authors Grinvald and Tur-Sinai describe the growing right to repair movement pushing for legislation to protect the right to repair and show how intellectual property laws should facilitate not interfere with consumers rights to repair what they own. The authors also propose a …
Elite Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza
Elite Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
Over the last twenty years, one of the most significant developments in intellectual property law has been the dramatic increase in the number of patent cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. That same time period has also seen the emergence of a small, elite group of lawyers specializing not in any particular area of substantive law but in litigation before the Supreme Court. In recent empirical work, I linked the Court’s growing interest in patent law to the more frequent participation of elite Supreme Court lawyers in patent cases, particularly at the cert. stage. Among other things, I found …
The Supreme Court Bar At The Bar Of Patents, Paul Gugliuzza
The Supreme Court Bar At The Bar Of Patents, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
Over the past two decades, a few dozen lawyers have come to dominate practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. By many accounts, these elite lawyers—whose clients are often among the largest corporations in the world—have spurred the Court to hear more cases that businesses care about and to decide those cases in favor of their clients. The Supreme Court’s recent case law on antitrust, arbitration, punitive damages, class actions, and more provides copious examples.
Though it is often overlooked in discussions of the emergent Supreme Court bar, patent law is another area in which the Court’s agenda has changed significantly …
The Procedure Of Patent Eligibility, Paul Gugliuzza
The Procedure Of Patent Eligibility, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
A decade ago, the patent-eligible subject matter requirement was defunct. Several recent Supreme Court decisions, however, have made eligibility the most important issue in many patent cases. To date, debates over the resurgent doctrine have focused mainly on its substance. Critics contend that the Supreme Court’s case law makes patents too easy to invalidate and discourages innovation. Supporters emphasize that the Court’s decisions help eradicate the overly broad patents often asserted by so-called patent trolls.
Yet one important consequence of eligibility’s revival has been procedural. Because district courts often view eligibility to present a pure question of law, they are—for …
Diffusing New Technology Without Dissipating Rents: Some Historical Case Studies Of Knowledge Sharing, James Bessen, Alessandro Nuvolari
Diffusing New Technology Without Dissipating Rents: Some Historical Case Studies Of Knowledge Sharing, James Bessen, Alessandro Nuvolari
Faculty Scholarship
The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors’ rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this article explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors’ incentives. Each new technology coexisted with an alternative for one or more decades. This allowed inventors to earn rents while sharing knowledge, attaining major productivity gains. The technology diffusion literature suggests that such circumstances are common during the early stages of a new technology.
Intellectual Property Harms: A Paradigm For The Twenty-First Century, Jessica Silbey
Intellectual Property Harms: A Paradigm For The Twenty-First Century, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This short essay is part of a larger book project that investigates how contemporary intellectual property debates, especially in the digital age, are taking place over less familiar terrain: fundamental rights and values. Its argument draws from the diverse, personal accounts of interviews from everyday creators and innovators and focuses on descriptions of harms and, as some say “abuses,” they suffer within their practicing communities. The harms are not described are the usual harms that intellectual property law is understood to prevent. Typically, intellectual property injuries are conceived in individual terms and as economic injuries. An infringer is a thief. …
Copyright’S Memory Hole, Jessica Silbey, Eric Goldman
Copyright’S Memory Hole, Jessica Silbey, Eric Goldman
Faculty Scholarship
There is growing interest in using copyright to protect the privacy and reputation of people depicted in copyrighted works. This pressure is driven by heightened concerns about privacy and reputation on the Internet, plus copyright’s plaintiff-favorable attributes compared to traditional privacy and reputation torts.
The Constitution authorizes copyright law because its exclusive rights benefit society by increasing our knowledge. Counterproductively, to advance privacy and reputation interests, copyright law is being misdeployed to suppress socially valuable works. This results in “memory holes” in society’s knowledge, analogous to those discussed in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
By referencing Constitutional considerations, the Article …
Draft Of Fair Use In Oracle: Proximate Cause At The Copyright/Patent Divide - 2019, Wendy J. Gordon
Draft Of Fair Use In Oracle: Proximate Cause At The Copyright/Patent Divide - 2019, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
This Paper was presented at the conference, "A Celebration of the Work of Wendy Gordon," at Boston University school of law on June 14, 2019. In presented an earlier draft under the title, Transformative Use, Proximate Cause, and Copyright, at the University of Texas at Austin on March 23, 2017. Under the title, Inegrating Judge Legal's Theory of Fair Use into on Economic View of Copyright Law: From "proximate Cause" to "Transormative Use," the paper was also presented at the March, 2016, "Conference on IP and Private Law," held at Harvard Law School. I am grateful to …
Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva Subotnik, Peter Dicola
Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva Subotnik, Peter Dicola
Faculty Scholarship
Intellectual property law has intended benefits, but it also carries certain costs — deliberately so. Skeptics have asked: Why should intellectual property law exist at all? To get traction on that overly broad but still important inquiry, we decided to ask a new, preliminary question: What do creators in a particular industry actually use intellectual property for? In this first-of-its-kind study, we conducted thirty-two in-depth qualitative interviews of photographers about how copyright law functions within their creative and business practices. By learning the actual functions of copyright law on the ground, we can evaluate and contextualize existing theories of intellectual …
Justifying Copyright In The Age Of Digital Reproduction: The Case Of Photographers, Jessica Silbey
Justifying Copyright In The Age Of Digital Reproduction: The Case Of Photographers, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explores the justification for copyright from two sources: seminal court cases and accounts from photographic authors. It takes as its premise that copyright protection requires justification, not only because creative work is frequently made and disseminated without reliance on copyright, but because, in the age of digital technology, practices of creative production and dissemination have sufficiently changed to question the existing contours of the forty-year-old Copyright Act. Why read the photographers’ stories alongside the court cases? Each present contested views of copyright’s relation to creativity. At times, the photographers’ accounts and the case law strengthen and reinforce each …
Control Over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle Of Copyright, Right Of Publicity, And The First Amendment, Jessica Silbey
Control Over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle Of Copyright, Right Of Publicity, And The First Amendment, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks …
Price Discrimination & Intellectual Property, Michael J. Meurer, Ben Depoorter
Price Discrimination & Intellectual Property, Michael J. Meurer, Ben Depoorter
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and price discrimination may not be apparent to non-economists. We introduce economists to the many facets of intellectual property law that influence the profitability and practice of price discrimination. The law in this area has complex effects on customer sorting and arbitrage. Intellectual property law offers fertile ground for analysis of policies that facilitate or discourage price discrimination. …
Rising Confusion About 'Arising Under' Jurisdiction In Patent Cases, Paul Gugliuzza
Rising Confusion About 'Arising Under' Jurisdiction In Patent Cases, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
By statute, all cases “arising under” patent law must be heard exclusively by the federal courts (not state courts) and, on appeal, by the Federal Circuit (not the twelve regional circuits). But not all cases involving patents “arise under” patent law. As recently as 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the mere need to apply patent law in, for example, a malpractice case involving a patent lawyer, is insufficient to trigger exclusive jurisdiction. Rather, the Court held, for a case that does not involve claims of patent infringement to arise under patent law, the patent issue must be “important . …