Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Intellectual Property Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law

Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein Oct 2008

Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of the current design of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts’ reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, the recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.


Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Oct 2008

Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Joseph Schumpeter's vision of competition saw it as a destructive process in which effort, assets and fortunes were continuously destroyed by innovation. One possible implication is that antitrust's attention on short-run price and output issues is myopic: what seems at first glance to be a monopolistic exclusionary practice might really be an innovative enterprise with enormous payoffs in the long run. While this may be the case, three qualifications are critical. First, one must not confuse the prospect of innovation with the scope of the intellectual property laws; their excesses and special interest capture cast serious doubt on the proposition …


Reconfiguring Property In Three Dimensions, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky Jan 2008

Reconfiguring Property In Three Dimensions, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we demonstrate that every property question invariably involves three distinct dimensions: (1) the number of owners, (2) the scope of owner’s dominion and (3) asset configuration. Furthermore, we claim that the interplay among the three dimensions shapes the field of property and holds the key to understanding the deep structure of property law. On this view, property law is a balancing act that requires policymakers and private actors to constantly juggle the often-conflicting demands lying along these three dimensions. The three-dimensional account of property we develop in this Article has important descriptive and normative implications. Descriptively, we …


Gone In Sixty Milliseconds: Trademark Law And Cognitive Science, Rebecca Tushnet Jan 2008

Gone In Sixty Milliseconds: Trademark Law And Cognitive Science, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Trademark dilution is a cause of action for interfering with the uniqueness of a trademark. For example, consumers would probably not think that "Kodak soap" was produced by the makers of Kodak cameras, but its presence in the market would diminish the uniqueness of the original Kodak mark. Trademark owners think dilution is harmful but have had difficulty explaining why. Many courts have therefore been reluctant to enforce dilution laws, even while legislatures have enacted more of them over the past half century. Courts and commentators have now begun to use psychological theories, drawing on associationist models of cognition, to …


Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison Jan 2008

Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on intellectual property law and business models, suggests the re-examination of the role of intellectual property law in the persistence of cultural forms of all sorts, including (but not limited to) business models. Some argue that the absence of intellectual property law inhibits the emergence of durable or persistent cultural forms; copyright and patent regimes are justified precisely because they supply foundations for durability. The essay tests that proposition via brief reviews of three persistent but very different cultural models, each of which represents a distinct form of American culture: The Rocky …


A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton Jan 2008

A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …


Who Owns 'Hillary.Com'? Political Speech And The First Amendment In Cyberspace, Jacqueline D. Lipton Jan 2008

Who Owns 'Hillary.Com'? Political Speech And The First Amendment In Cyberspace, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In the lead-up to the next presidential election, it will be important for candidates both to maintain an online presence and to exercise control over bad faith uses of domain names and web content related to their campaigns. What are the legal implications for the domain name system? Although, for example, Senator Hillary Clinton now owns "hillaryclinton.com", the more generic "hillary.com" is registered to a software firm, Hillary Software, Inc. What about "hillary2008.com"? It is registered to someone outside the Clinton campaign and is not currently in active use. This article examines the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain …