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Intellectual Property Law Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law

Regulating Patent Assertions, Paul Gugliuzza Oct 2016

Regulating Patent Assertions, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen a proliferation of statutes regulating and lawsuits challenging patent enforcement conduct. The Federal Circuit, however, has held that acts of patent enforcement are illegal only if there is clear and convincing evidence both that the patent holder’s infringement allegations were objectively baseless and that the patent holder knew or should have known its allegations were baseless. This chapter summarizes recent efforts by state governments and the federal government to control patent enforcement behavior, questions the broad immunity the Federal Circuit has conferred on patent holders, and seeks to improve pending federal legislation governing patent enforcement. In …


The Supreme Assimilation Of Patent Law, Peter Lee Jan 2016

The Supreme Assimilation Of Patent Law, Peter Lee

Michigan Law Review

Although tensions between universality and exceptionalism apply throughout law, they are particularly pronounced in patent law, a field that deals with highly technical subject matter. This Article explores these tensions by investigating an underappreciated descriptive theory of Supreme Court patent jurisprudence. Significantly extending previous scholarship, it argues that the Court’s recent decisions reflect a project of eliminating “patent exceptionalism” and assimilating patent doctrine to general legal principles (or, more precisely, to what the Court frames as general legal principles). Among other motivations, this trend responds to rather exceptional patent doctrine emanating from the Federal Circuit in areas as varied as …