Law Commons^™

Creating Effective Broadband Network Regulation, Daniel L. Brenner

Daniel L. Brenner

ABSTRACT: The Internet is central to the business and pastimes of Americans. Calls for increased regulation are ongoing, inevitable, and often justified. But calls for “network neutrality” or “nondiscrimination” assume with little hesitation federal agency competence to give predictable and accurate meaning to these terms and create regulations to implement them. This article’s chief contribution to Internet policy debate is to focus attention on the likelihood of successful FCC Internet regulation -- a key assumption of some advocates. The article analyzes three characteristics that hobble the FCC, the likeliest federal agency to provide prescriptive rules. First, the record for the …

The Yahoo Case And Free Speech, Privacy And Corporate Responsibilty In The People's Republic Of China, Nikola A. Koritz

Nikola A Koritz

It’s like opening Pandora’s Box. You can’t put the content back. When China made the Internet commercially available in 1995 it opened the floodgate to information and free communication. But the free exchange of ideas and information over the Internet threatens China’s ability to control information exchange. The People’s Republic of China enacted restrictive regulations controlling Internet usage and is adjusting these regulations in the pace of the technical development. This paper addresses the question how international companies who want to do business in China can comply with these circumstances without compromising substantial human rights and getting themselves in conflict …

A Uniquely Canadian Institution: The Copyright Board Of Canada, Daniel J. Gervais

Daniel J Gervais

Several countries have fostered the growth of Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) through legislative initiatives in the belief that CMOs offer a viable solution to the problems associated with individual licensing, collecting royalties and enforcing copyright against large numbers of users. In theory, collective licensing enables creators to exercise rights in a fair, efficient and accessible manner. It ensures copyright protection when individual management of it becomes difficult or impracticable. However, collective management is not a panacea, and questions have been raised about the efficiency and the transparency of CMOs and their continued relevancy in the digital age. This Chapter attempts …

Who's Your Daddy?: A Psychoanalytic Exegesis Of The Supreme Court's Recent Patent Jurisprudence, Gretchen S. Sween

Gretchen S. Sween

ABSTRACT Who’s Your Daddy?: A Psychoanalytic Exegesis of the Supreme Court’s Recent Patent Jurisprudence Gretchen S. Sween, Ph.D., J.D. Dechert LLP 300 W. 6th Street Suite 1850 Austin, TX 78701 gretchen.sween@dechert.com Since a new administration took office in 2001, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in, and then decided, twelve patent cases in six years. Even more extraordinary is the Supreme Court’s remarkable consistency during this recent incursion into patent law: it has either reversed, vacated, and/or remanded Federal Circuit decisions in each instance in opinions that have been unanimous or nearly unanimous. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s rhetoric in formulating …

"Fit For Purpose:" Why The European Union Should Not Extend The Term Of Related Rights Protection In Europe, Susanna Monseau

Susanna Monseau

This paper argues that the European Union should not, as it currently proposes, extend the term of protection for sound recordings in Europe. It compares the U.K. government’s current policy that the scope and length of copyright protection for sound recordings should not be extended, with that of the European Union which, encouraged by the French government particularly, has recently proposed an extension from the 50 year term to a 95-year term of copyright protection for sound recordings. It analyzes several major independent reviews of the evidence on extending copyright protection for sound recordings, including the findings and recommendations of …

Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through The Lens Of Innovation, Ryan G. Vacca

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Over the past several years scholars have wrestled with how property rights in items created in virtual worlds should be conceptualized. Regardless of how the property is conceptualized and what property theory best fits, most agree the law ought to recognize virtual property as property and vest someone with those rights.

This article moves beyond the conceptualization debate and asks two new questions from a new perspective. First, how ought virtual property rights be allocated so innovation and creativity can be maximized? Second, how can the law be changed to remove barriers that unnecessarily impede a regime that maximizes creativity …

How To Save The Recording Industry?: Charge Less, Zac Locke

Zac Locke

“How much is music worth?” It is painfully clear that the traditional fifteen dollars charged for a packaged CD is too much. CD sales declined another fourteen percent in 2007, on top of years of similar erosion. As selling music online becomes the way of selling music of the future, record labels, music publishers and music e-tailers must find the ideal price point for their product. This Article defines the ideal price point at the price where the profit is maximized while making it easier for consumers to buy a song rather than download it for free. Technology, through replacing …

“All Life Is An Experiment”: Research Tool Patents, Epistemological Monopolies, And The First Amendment, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

This piece explores the largely unexamined relationship between patent law and the First Amendment. It focuses on patents on so-called “research tools”—technological products and processes that comprise vital inputs to basic scientific experimentation. Recent patent scholarship suggests that these patents may inhibit scientific inquiry, as they prevent scientists from accessing foundational technologies necessary to conduct basic research. Applying prevailing theories of the First Amendment, I argue that government-granted exclusive rights on these foundational technologies violate well-established free speech principles. Research tools patents impoverish the marketplace of ideas, undermine “scientific expression,” compromise the communal norms of the scientific community, and hinder …

Regulating Search, Viva R. Moffat

Viva R. Moffat

With the digital revolution and the internet age have come not just material and resources unimaginable fifty years ago, but also an overwhelming onslaught of information. Search engines have become the crucial intermediary in this online world, ameliorating the “information overload” and serving as the gatekeepers of the Internet. Academic commentators have recognized the significance of the issues posed by search engines’ role as a crucial intermediary, but the conversation about the appropriate structures for regulating search is still in its early stages. Thus far, the debate is a bipolar one: market regulation versus agency regulation.

In this paper, I …

The Harry Potter Lexicon And The World Of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, And Copyright, Aaron Schwabach

Aaron Schwabach

Fan fiction, long a nearly invisible form of outsider art, has grown exponentially in volume and legal importance in the past decade. Because of its nature, authorship, and underground status, fan fiction stands at an intersection of issues of property, sexuality, and gender. This article examines three disputes over fan writings, concluding with the recent dispute between J.K. Rowling and Steven Vander Ark over the Harry Potter Lexicon, which Rowling once praised and more recently succeeded in suppressing. The article builds on and adds to the emerging body of scholarship on fan fiction, concluding that much fan fiction is fair …

Trafficking In Trademarks: Setting Boundaries For The Uneasy Relationship Between "Property" Rights And Trademark And Publicity Rights, Sheldon W. Halpern

Sheldon W Halpern

The piece is concerned with the general problem of the relationship between “property” constructs on the one hand and trademark and right of publicity law on the other. More specifically, it deals with the need to establish workable boundaries for trademark law and related right of publicity claims. The issue is seen most clearly in connection with “merchandising” of the trademark or image itself. The approach to merchandising rights with respect both to trademarks and celebrity images has been needlessly complex and demands simplification. The Supreme Court’ recent series of trademark opinions, with their strong admonition to restore and recognize …

Who Are These People? New Generation Employees And Trade Secrets, Elizabeth A. Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

Traditional approaches to examining the efficacy of trade secret protection in the workplace are often focused on technological and process based measures. Indeed, much attention has focused on the use of technology, by itself, to stem trade secret misappropriation. This Article offers a novel approach to the problem by incorporating contextual factors that might be important to trade secret protection and focuses on the people. It also, for the first time, applies sociological theories about employee theft to trade secret misappropriation. Working from the outside in, the Article examines first the reported societal effects on the values of those workers …

The Duty Of Treatment: Human Rights And The Hiv/Aids Pandemic, Noah B. Novogrodsky

Noah B Novogrodsky

This article argues that the treatment of HIV and AIDS is spawning a juridical, advocacy and enforcement revolution. The intersection of AIDS and human rights was once characterized almost exclusively by anti-discrimination and destigmatization efforts. Today, human rights advocates are demanding life-saving treatment and convincing courts and legislatures to make states pay for it. Using a comparative Constitutional law methodology that places domestic courts at the center of the struggle for HIV treatment, this article shows how the provision of AIDS medications is reframing the right to health and the implementation of socio-economic rights. First, it locates an emerging right …

Copyright And The Fashion Industry, Victoria R. Watkins

Victoria R Watkins

This paper seeks to discuss the relationship, or lack there of, between copyrights and the fashion industry. Although fashion designs are works of authorship, and comply with originality requirements of § 102 of the Copyright Act, the structure and nature of the industry do not compel the need for this protection, enabling it to run efficiently without it. In order to prove the stated claim, the article will examine the history of the industry, case law, other scholarly writings and current trends in the market.

Analysis Of The Ksr's Ruling On Electronics Patents, Shubha Ghosh, Li Li

Shubha Ghosh

This article examines the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in KSR v. Teleflex on electronics patents as well as patent portfolios. By analyzing several subsequent cases regarding electronic patents, the article articulates the basic principle of non-obviousness in electronic patents. Applying the principle into the analysis of a hypothetical, the analysis predicts that many issued patents having combination of prior art under the TSM test may not pass the high hurdle of non-obviousness under the KSR ruling. Furthermore, the paper extends the KSR ruling to the value assessment of a patent portfolio. At last, the article proposes a tentative …

Protection And Enforcement Of Well-Known Mark Rights In China: History, Theory, And Future, Shubha Ghosh, Jing Brad Luo

Shubha Ghosh

Contrary to the popular notion that China does not have strong protection for international well-known marks, China does in fact has in place an institutional structure for the protection of well-known marks. This institutional structure evolved over the last few decades as China gradually opened itself up to the rest of the world, which evolution reflects and corresponds to the international and domestic forces underlying the gradual development of the Chinese trademark law. This institutional structure, in its current form, promises a wide range of remedies to rights holders in case of infringement. Despite laudable progress wrought in by this …

The Impact Of Government-Mandated Public Access To Biomedical Research: An Analysis Of The New Nih Depository Requirements, Kristopher A. Nelson

Kristopher A Nelson

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. The bill, which became Public Law 110-161, contained a new requirement that manuscripts developed through funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be made available to the public, free of charge, within one year after publication. This new mandatory requirement struck a compromise position between the existing pay-to-access model of private journal publishers and the potential free-for-all of the public domain. But did it go far enough? Should Congress have adopted a more aggressive policy of opening access to research? Alternatively, did Congress go too far, …

Testing The Over- And Under-Exploitation Hypotheses: Bestselling Musical Compositions (1913-32) And Their Use In Cinema (1968-2007), Paul J. Heald

Paul J. Heald

Some economists assert that as valuable works transition from copyrighted status and fall into the public domain they will be underexploited and their value dissipated. Others insist instead that without an owner to control their use, valuable public domain works will be overexploited or otherwise debased. This study of the most valuable musical compositions from 1913-32 demonstrates that neither hypothesis is true as it applies to the exploitation of songs in movies from 1968-2007. When compositions fall into the public domain, they are just as likely to be exploited in movies, suggesting no under-exploitation. And the rate of exploitation of …

Rolling Equilibriums At The Pre-Commons Frontier: Identifying Patently Efficient Royalties For Complex Products, F. Russell Denton

F. Russell Denton

Patent pricing problems have roiled industry in recent years. The biggest challenge may be splintered in-licensing of dozens or even thousands of patents for a single behemoth product, where ubiquitous overlaps in invention utility frustrate rational splitting of royalties. That issue is especially daunting for software, computer chips and biotechnology. Judicial remedies are no better: courts have been unable to streamline or standardize the analysis for infringement dam-ages under the prevailing Georgia-Pacific rule. The historic weakness of financial science for intangible assets, along with cherry picking by parties, hobbles G-P’s 15-factor analysis. The universal fog in allocating royalties creates license …

Rethinking "Reasonable Efforts" To Protect Trade Secrets In A Digital World, Elizabeth Rowe

Elizabeth A Rowe

The very technological tools in use today that increase the efficiency with which companies do business create challenges for trade secret protection. They make trade secrets easier to store, easier to access, easier to disseminate, and more portable, thus increasing the risks that trade secrets will be destroyed. While secrecy is the sine qua non of trade secret protection, it can be difficult to accomplish. There is a tension between the need to keep information secret and modern technological methods that allow the information to be easily accessed, reproduced, and disseminated. In trade secret misappropriation cases, courts evaluate the sufficiency …

Patents As Property: Conceptualizing The Exclusive Right(S) In Patent Law, Adam Mossoff

Adam Mossoff

The conventional wisdom is that the definition of patents as property has been long settled: unlike land and chattels, which secure the traditional "bundle" of rights, patents secure only a negative right to exclude. In exploring the history of American patent law, this Article reveals that this claim is profoundly mistaken. For much of its history, a patent was defined by Congress and courts in the same conceptual terms as property in land and chattels, as securing the exclusive rights of possession, use and disposition. Nineteenth-century courts explicitly used this substantive conception of patents to create many longstanding legal doctrines, …

On Breaking Patents: Separating Strands Of Fact From Fiction Under Trips, Cynthia M. Ho

Cynthia M Ho

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of when compulsory licensing of patents is permissible as a matter of international law under the Agreement of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). Thailand’s recent compulsory licenses of patents on a variety of medications provide a convenient vehicle to analyze the limits of compulsory licensing under TRIPS. Thailand’s actions are unique; most countries hesitate to issue compulsory licenses in the wake of legal uncertainties regarding TRIPS requirements as well as political pressure. This article capitalizes on the many issues involved in Thailand’s licenses to provide an authoritative interpretation of the scope of …

Grokster, Bittorrent, Copyright Infringement, And Inducement: How Modus Operandi Can Provide A Functional Standard For Future File-Sharing Cases, Jamie Gregorian

Jamie Gregorian

In 2005, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. In that ruling, the Court created the inducement standard, a new avenue by which artists could pursue claims against file-sharing companies that were facilitating the infringement of their intellectual property. Under the inducement standard, the act of inducing another to infringe copyright is now sufficient to confer secondary liability. As file-sharing outfits continue to learn from previous judicial decisions and tailor their infringement-facilitating software so as to avoid legal liability, the criminal law concept of modus operandi may prove beneficial to courts in deciding …

Improving The Federal Circuit's Approach To Choice Of Law For Procedural Matters In Patent Cases, Ted L. Field

Ted L. Field

Because of its virtually exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases from the entire country, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit faces a unique situation with respect to choice of law for procedural matters in patent cases. Normally, in a non-patent-related case, a district court applies the procedural-law precedent of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the circuit in which the district court sits. However, because the Federal Circuit’s jurisdiction is based on subject matter rather than geography, the court has had to choose whether (1) to develop and apply its own precedent to procedural matters or (2) …

Plain Language Patents, Robin C. Feldman

Robin C Feldman

Law is a process of Bounded Adaptation. The law that exists at any given moment is constantly driven to adapt to changing circumstances within the framework of what has gone before. The boundaries of that framework are policed by the necessity of articulating an interpretation in a way that gains general acceptance. It is the need to effectively articulate a common logic that mitigates the distortion of personal perspective.

This process of Bounded Adaptation cannot proceed effectively without an adequately structured dialogue that will promote the flow of information and analysis. Nowhere is this dialogue more challenging than at the …

Contracting To Preserve Open Science: The Privatization Of Public Policy In Patent Law, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

Patents on biomedical research tools—technological inputs to experimentation—may inhibit scientific inquiry and the development of life-enhancing therapies. Various “public law” approaches to address this challenge, such as a common law experimental use exception to patent infringement, have achieved limited success. In the wake of these shortcomings, this Article argues that institutions are utilizing a new model of private ordering to resolve research holdup. Increasingly, federal and state agencies, universities, non-profits, and disease advocacy groups are conditioning the provision of vital research support on requirements that recipients of this support make resulting patented inventions widely available for noncommercial research purposes. In …

Patents As Property: Conceptualizing The Exclusive Right(S) In Patent Law, Adam Mossoff

Adam Mossoff

The conventional wisdom is that the definition of patents as property has been long settled-—patents secure only a right to exclude. In exploring the intellectual history of American patent law, this Article reveals that this claim is profoundly mistaken. For much of its history, Congress and courts defined a patent in the same conceptual terms as property in land and chattels, as securing the exclusive rights of possession, use and disposition. Nineteenth-century courts explicitly used this substantive conception of patents to create many longstanding doctrines in the American patent system, such as the conveyance default rules now known as patent …

Common Sense: Treating Statutory Non-Obviousness As A Novelty Issue, N. Scott Pierce

N. Scott Pierce

Title 35 of United States Code, at Section 103, limits patent protection to subject matter that would not be “obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.” The requirement was introduced as a statute by the Patent Act of 1952, but, according to the legislative history, was a codification of judicial precedent. The origin of that precedent is widely attributed to the 1851 Supreme Court decision of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1851). However, declaration of Hotchkiss as a watershed moment in legal history …

Guns And Speech Technologies: How The Right To Bear Arms Affects Copyright Regulations Of Speech Technologies, Edward Lee

Edward Lee

This Essay examines the possible effect the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller will have on future cases brought under the Free Press Clause. Based on the text and history of the Constitution, the connection between the two Clauses is undeniable, as the Heller Court itself repeatedly suggested. Only two provisions in the entire Constitution protect individual rights to a technology: the Second Amendment’s right to bear “arms” and the Free Press Clause’s right to the freedom of the “press,” meaning the printing press. Both rights were viewed, moreover, as preexisting, natural rights to …

Trafficking In Trademarks: Setting Boundaries For The Uneasy Relationship Between “Property” Rights And Trademark And Publicity Rights, Sheldon W. Halpern

Sheldon W Halpern

The piece is concerned with the general problem of the relationship between “property” constructs on the one hand and trademark and right of publicity law on the other. More specifically, it deals with the need to establish workable boundaries for trademark law and related right of publicity claims. The issue is seen most clearly in connection with “merchandising” of the trademark or image itself.

The approach to merchandising rights with respect both to trademarks and celebrity images has been needlessly complex and demands simplification. The Supreme Court’ recent series of trademark opinions, with their strong admonition to restore and recognize …