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Full-Text Articles in Law
What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman
What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman
Journal Articles
Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system. This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of border-drawing that our IP system undertakes — identifying “useful” subject matter.
This aspect is critical because our IP system gives utility patent law pride of place and draws the boundaries of the other doctrines in large part to respect utility patent’s supremacy. Yet IP law’s sense …
Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn
Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn
Journal Articles
Technology increasingly allows for digital distribution of goods that once might once have been offered in physical form, radically separating the design and production processes. That separation has potentially destabilizing consequences for trademark law, which overwhelmingly has been oriented toward indications of the origin of physical goods. For one thing, digitization brings much more of trademark law into contact with the Supreme Court's Dastar decision, raising difficult questions about whether, and under what circumstances, digital files count as “goods” for Lanham Act purposes. More broadly, a world of increasing digitization implicates concerns about the boundaries of trademark law vis-à-vis other …