Law Commons^™

Intellectual Property And The Myth Of Nonrivalry, James Y. Stern

Notre Dame Law Review

The concept of rivalry is central to modern accounts of property. When one per-son’s use of a resource is incompatible with another’s, a system of rights to determine its use may be necessary. It is commonly asserted, however, that informational goods like inventions and expressive works are nonrivalrous and that intellectual property rights must therefore be subject to special limitation, if they should even exist at all. This Article examines the idea of rivalry more closely and makes a series of claims about the analysis of rivalrousness for purposes of such arguments. Within that frame-work, it argues that rivalry should …

Note: Artistic Relevance In Artificial Intelligence? “Roger” That!, Kelly Heilman

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

In an era of technological revolution, artificial intelligence is shocking the legal field with its increasing popularity, power, and potential. The limits of property, personhood, and creativity are in question by both the public and the courts, leaving significant ambiguities in the law. Legal standards regarding the regulation of advanced technologies have raised unique and critical substantive questions for intellectual property rights, particularly that of trademarks, where the traditional purpose is source identification between consumers and goods.

Since the 1989 holding in Rogers v. Grimaldi, the use of trademarks for creative purposes, as a matter of First Amendment jurisprudence, …

Note: Patentability Of 3d Printed Biomaterials, Nicole Barba

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

The Congressional criteria for patentability, detailed in 35 U.S.C §§101-03, states that an invention must be novel, useful, and nonobvious. In addition to these requirements, the Judiciary requires that the invention not be classified as a law of nature, natural phenomenon, or abstract idea. The purpose of each of these criterion is to ensure that patents are granted only to inventions that “promote the Progress of . . . useful Arts.” As new technologies emerge, it is unclear whether these judicially created criteria still serve that purpose or whether the criteria are overly expansive such that truly useful inventions are …

Property And Equity In Trademark Law, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This essay, delivered as the Nies Lecture at Marquette Law School, focuses on changes in the doctrinal structure of trademark law over the course of the last century — specifically with respect to the relationship between trademark law’s limits and the broader common law of unfair competition. Changes in that relationship, I will argue, meaningfully increased trademark law's emphasis on property — what the plaintiff owns — and deemphasized legal rules that focused on the defendant’s conduct.

Comparative Analysis Of Innovation Failures And Institutions In Context, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Many different legal and non-legal institutions govern and therefore shape knowledge production. It is tempting, given the various types of knowledge, knowledge producers, and systems with and within which knowledge and knowledge producers and users interact, to look for reductionist shortcuts — in general but especially in the context of comparative institutional analysis. The temptation should be resisted for it leads to either what Harold Demsetz called the Nirvana Fallacy or what Elinor Ostrom critiqued as myopic allegories.

We suggest that comparative institutional analysis must be accompanied by comparative failure analysis, by which we mean rigorous and contextual comparative analysis …

Technical Standards Meet Administrative Law: A Teaching Guide On Incorporation By Reference, Emily S. Bremer

Journal Articles

When an agency incorporates by reference, it promulgates a rule that identifies—but does not reprint—material already published elsewhere. The incorporated materials thus become binding law without actually being printed in the agency's regulations. Sometimes the incorporated materials are privately developed technical standards, which are often copyrighted and available only for a fee. This restriction on access undermines transparency and public participation in the rulemaking process. Finding a solution is challenging because the problem is multidimensional, implicating public policy in the areas of administrative law, federal standards law and policy, and copyright.

This teaching guide is part of module that offers …

Notre Dame Lawyer—2018, Notre Dame Law School

Notre Dame Lawyer

INSIDE

Leading News

Dean Newton Steps Down

Briefs

• Off the Bench—Prominent judges visit ND Law School
• Law School improves Loan Repayment Assistance Program
• Galilee sees record participation
• ‘You are the hope’—ND Law hosts one of Church’s leading voices on race
• Program on Church, State & Society growing
• ‘Fighting for Fair Housing’—Law School hosts conference on Fair Housing Act of 1968
• ND alumni talk about Guantanamo detention facility
• Religious freedom moot court team wins in Italy
• Music lesson—The Slants rock McCartan Courtroom
• Commencement 2018
• Exoneration Project inspires law students

Profiles—A Different Kind of Lawyer

• A Bridge to Home—James Cheney ’18 J.D. …

Proximate Vs. Geographic Limits On Patent Damages, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

The exclusive rights of a U.S. patent are limited in two important ways. First, a patent has a technical scope—only the products and methods set out in the patent’s claims may constitute infringement. Second, a patent has a geographic scope—making, using, or selling the products or methods described in the patent’s claims will only constitute infringement if that activity takes place in the United States. These boundaries are foundational features of the patent system: there can be no liability for U.S. patent infringement without an act that falls within both the technical and geographic scope of the patent.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet, John A. Conway

Court Briefs

Plaintiff’s false designation of origin and false endorsement claims, such as they are, rest on the assertion that defendants falsely represented themselves as the origin of intellectual property on which the Oculus Rift is based. Those claims are barred by Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), which holds that only confusion regarding the origin of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act.

2016 Trademark Year In Review, Mark P. Mckenna, Shelby Niemann

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

This brief Essay reviews some of the most significant developments in trademark law during the past year. In most cases, we have interpreted “year” fairly liberally, particularly to highlight some longer-term trends. We focus on six areas: (1) the constitutionality of section 2(a) of the Lanham Act; (2) the Fourth Circuit’s Belmora decision and the availability of section 43(a) claims when the plaintiff has not used a mark in the United States; (3) the effect of B & B Hardware; (4) injunctive relief and the presumption of irreparable harm; (5) nominative fair use; and (6) initial interest confusion.

Incentivizing Graffiti: Extending Copyright Protection To A Prominent Artistic Movement, Sara Cloon

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

This Note outlines a brief history of graffiti, emphasizes the growing importance of graffiti as an accepted and widespread artistic movement, and applies the copyright requirements under the Copyright Act and the Visual Artists Rights Act to graffiti. Finally, this Note argues that under an incentive-based theory of intellectual property, copyright law should not exclude graffiti when it already fits within statutory law, as this would create inefficiency and contradiction in copyright law, which is meant to continually expand to accept new art forms.

Criminal Trademark Enforcement And The Problem Of Inevitable Creep, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Article, delivered as the 2017 Oldham Lecture at the University of Akron School of Law, focuses on the federal Trademark Counterfeiting Act (TCA), the primary source of federal criminal trademark sanctions. That statute was intended to increase the penalties associated with the most egregious form of trademark infringement — use of an identical mark for goods identical to those for which the mark is registered and in a context in which the use is likely to deceive consumers about the actual source of the counterfeiter’s goods. The TCA was intended to ratchet up the penalties associated with counterfeiting, but …

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 …

Introduction: Negotiating Ip's Boundaries In An Evolving World, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

The common element of the articles that make up this Symposium Issue is a refusal to dismiss difficult questions with mechanical formality, to paper over the wrinkles that emerge when the simple models that function in the middle flounder at the edge. As this Symposium Issue will show, those wrinkles have a lot to tell us.

Scope, Mark Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley

Journal Articles

Virtually every significant legal doctrine in IP is either about whether the plaintiff has a valid IP right that the law will recognize (validity); whether the defendant's conduct violates that right (infringement); or whether the defendant is somehow privileged to violate that right (defenses). IP regimes tend to separate doctrines in these three legal categories relatively strictly. They apply different burdens of proof and persuasion to infringement and validity. In many cases they ask different actors to decide one doctrine but not the other. And even where none of that is true, the nature of IP law is to categorize …

Response: Systems Of Human And Intellectual Capital, Mark Mckenna, Brett F. Frischmann

Journal Articles

This essay reviews Orly Lobel's article The New Cognitive Property: Human Capital Law and the Reach of Intellectual Property. It commends Professor Lobel for outlining the contours of the “new” field of human capital law, and for emphasizing the potential consequences of the growing enclosure of cognitive capacities in contemporary markets. From this starting point the essay makes two modest suggestions for researchers. First, it suggests that those building on Lobel’s work consider more contextual description and evaluation of human and intellectual capital production systems. Doing so would avoid overly abstract, macro-level analysis that is often divorced from reality and …

Symposium: Creativity And The Law: Introduction, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

Creativity is on the American mind. President Obama routinely suggests that creativity and ingenuity are the keys to America's economic future. Bill Gates emphasizes the power of creativity to solve the world's most pressing, and most difficult, problems. 2 But the creativity story is, of late, usually bleakly told: indeed, a recent Newsweek cover story proclaimed a "Creativity Crisis." Last November, a group of twelve academics gathered at the Notre Dame Law School to consider law's role in this story. What is creativity, and how does it map onto legal concepts like originality, novelty, or non-obviousness? What should law, and …

Rules For Growth: Promoting Innovation And Growth Through Legal Reform, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Robert E. Litan, Yochai Benkler, Henry N. Butler, John Henry Clippinger, Robert Cook-Deegan, Robert D. Cooter, Aaron S. Edlin, Ronald J. Gilson, Oliver R. Goodenough, Gillian K. Hadfield, Mark A. Lemley, Frank Partnoy, George L. Priest, Larry E. Ribstein, Charles F. Sabel, Peter H. Schuck, Hal S. Scott, Robert E. Scott, Alex Stein, Victoria Stodden, John E. Tyler Iii, Alan D. Viard, Benjamin Wittes

Journal Articles

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of sustaining growth both in the short and long runs. In response to this challenge, the Kauffman Foundation convened a number of America’s leading legal scholars and social scientists during the summer of 2010 to present and discuss their ideas for changing legal rules and policies to promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth. This meeting led to the publication …

Intergenerational Progress, Brett Frischmann, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Essay prepared for the Wisconsin Law Review’s symposium on Intergenerational Equity lays the groundwork for a broader understanding of the goals of IP law in the United States by arguing that there is room for a normative commitment to intergenerational justice. First, we argue that the normative basis for IP laws need not be utilitarianism. The Constitution does not require that we conceive of IP in utilitarian terms or that we aim only to promote efficiency or maximize value. To the contrary, the IP Clause leaves open a number of ways to conceive of Progress; courts’ and scholars’ overwhelming …

Testing Modern Trademark Law's Theory Of Harm, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Modern scholarship takes a decidedly negative view of trademark law. Commentators rail against doctrinal innovations like dilution and initial interest confusion. They clamor for clearer and broader defenses. And they plead for greater First Amendment scrutiny of various applications of trademark law. But beneath all of this criticism lies overwhelming agreement that consumer confusion is harmful. This easy acceptance of the harmfulness of confusion is a problem because it operates at too high a level of generality, ignoring important differences between types of relationships about which consumers might be confused. Failure to differentiate between these different relationships has enabled trademark …

Teaching Trademark Theory Through The Lens Of Distinctiveness, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the annual teaching edition of the Saint Louis University Law Journal encourages teachers to begin trademark law courses using the concept of distinctiveness as a vehicle for articulating producer and consumer perspectives in trademark law. Viewing the law through these sometimes different perspectives helps in approaching a variety of doctrines in trademark law, and both perspectives are relatively easy to grasp in the context of distinctiveness.

The Normative Foundations Of Trademark Law, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that trademark law traditionally sought to protect consumers and enhance marketplace efficiency. Contrary to widespread contemporary understanding, early trademark cases were decidedly producer-centered. Trademark infringement claims, like all unfair competition claims, were intended to protect producers from illegitimate attempts to divert their trade. Consumer deception was relevant in these cases only to the extent it was the means by which a competitor diverted a producer's trade. Moreover, American courts from the very beginning protected a party against improperly diverted trade in part by recognizing a narrow form ofproperty rights in trademarks. Those rights were …

Intellectual Property, Privatization And Democracy: A Response To Professor Rose, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

The broad thesis of Professor Rose's article Privatization: The Road to Democracy? is an important reminder that no institution deserves all the credit for democratization, and that the success of any particular institution in promoting democracy depends to a greater or lesser extent on the existence and functioning of other political institutions. While protection of private property has proven quite important to successful democratic reform, we should not be lulled into thinking private property can carry the whole weight of reform. That lesson has particular significance in the context of intellectual property, given proponents general tendency to overstate the significance …

The Rehnquist Court And The Groundwork For Greater First Amendment Scrutiny Of Intellectual Property, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the Washington University School of Law conference on the Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment addresses the Rehnquist Court's view of the role of the First Amendment in intellectual property cases. It argues that, while the Rehnquist Court was not eager to find a conflict between intellectual property laws and the First Amendment, there is reason to believe that it set the stage for greater First Amendment scrutiny of intellectual property protections. At the very least, the Court left that road open to future courts, which might be inclined to view intellectual property more skeptically.

Refusals To Deal With Competitors By Owners Of Patents And Copyrights: Reflections On The Image Technical And Xerox Decisions, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Under the patent and copyright laws, the owner of a patent for an invention or of a copyright for a work has the right to sell, license or transfer it, to exploit it individually and exclusively, or even to decide to withhold it from the public. By contrast, under the antitrust laws, a unilateral refusal to deal may constitute an element of a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and the courts may then impose a duty on the violator to deal with others, including possibly with its actual or would-be competitors.

The central question addressed by this …

The Right Of Publicity And Autonomous Self-Definition, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

Legal protection against unauthorized commercial uses of an individual's identity has grown significantly over the last fifty years as it has relentlessly pursued economic value. It was forced to focus on value because a false distinction between the harms suffered by private citizens and celebrities seemingly left celebrities without a privacy claim for commercial use of their identities. But the normative case for awarding individuals the economic value of their identity is weak, since celebrities do not need additional incentive to invest in either their native skill or in developing a persona. Still, while the prevailing justification is inadequate, as …

Defending Cyberproperty, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

This Article explores how the law should treat legal claims by owners of Internet-connected computer systems to enjoin unwanted uses of their systems. Over the last few years, this question has become increasingly urgent and controversial, as system owners have sought protection from unsolicited commercial e-mail and from robots that extract data from Web servers for competitive purposes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, courts utilizing a wide range of legal doctrines upheld claims by network resource owners to prevent unwanted access to their computer networks. The vast weight of legal scholarship has voiced strong opposition to these cyberproperty …

Trips Agreement And Direct Effect In European Community Law: You Can Look...But Can You Touch, Mark Miller

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.