Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Regulatory Competitive Shelters, Yaniv Heled

Yaniv Heled

This Article identifies an array of seemingly disparate federal exclusivity regimes as belonging to an increasingly prevalent and relatively new class of highly valuable government benefits, which it names “regulatory competitive shelters” (RCSs). It characterizes RCSs and distinguishes them from other, more traditional kinds of government-instituted properties. The Article then proceeds to describe a particular brand of RCSs established in federal statutory frameworks whose aim—much like patents—is to create incentives for technological innovation. Identifying several common motifs of such RCS regimes, the Article offers a taxonomy of these RCSs and describes the mechanisms by which RCSs instituted under such regimes …

On Patenting Human Organisms Or How The Abortion Wars Feed Into The Ownership Fallacy, Yaniv Heled

Yaniv Heled

The idea of ominous technologies that put human individuals or parts of their bodies under someone else's control has been stirring emotions and terrifying people for centuries. It was a recent offshoot of this idea--the notion of “patenting humans”--that mobilized certain members of Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the issuance of patent claims “directed to or encompassing a human organism.” The values underlying this legislation may well have been agreeable, even admirable. Yet, the actual motivation for it was misguided; its execution, deeply flawed; its potential outcomes, hazardous

This Article reviews the history and background of this prohibition. It fleshes …

Response To 'Pervasive Sequence Patents Cover The Entire Human Genome', Shine Tu, Yaniv Heled

Yaniv Heled

In a widely reported article by Jeffrey Rosenfeld and Christopher Mason published in Genome Medicine, significant misstatements were made, because the authors did not sufficiently review the claims – which define the legal scope of a patent – in the patents they analyzed. Specifically, the authors do not provide an adequate basis for their assertion that 41% of the genes in the human genome have been claimed.

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Yaniv Heled

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …