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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law
America's First Patents, Michael Risch
America's First Patents, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
Courts and commentators vigorously debate early American patent history because of a spotty documentary record. To fill these gaps, scholars have examined the adoption of the Intellectual Property Clause of the Constitution, correspondence, dictionaries, and British and colonial case law. But there is one largely ignored body of information — the content of early patents themselves. While many debate what the founders thought, no one asks what early inventors thought — and those thoughts are telling. This Article is the first comprehensive examination of how early inventors and their patents should inform our current thoughts about the patent system. To …
Patent Troll Myths, Michael Risch
Patent Troll Myths, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
It turns out that just about everything we thought about patent trolls – good or bad – is wrong. Using newly gathered data, this article presents an ethnography of sorts about highly litigious non-practicing entity (NPE) plaintiffs. The results are surprising: they show that the conventional wisdom about patent trolls is likely based on anecdotal, but infrequently occurring, events. Instead, the patents enforced by so-called trolls – and the companies that obtained them – look a lot like other litigated patents and their owners. To be sure, whether an NPE qualifies as a troll depends on who is doing the …
Ip And Entrepreneurship In An Evolving Economy: A Case Study, Michael Risch
Ip And Entrepreneurship In An Evolving Economy: A Case Study, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
What if you built an intellectual property clinic and hardly anyone came? This brief book chapter is a case study of the first two years of a new entrepreneurship law clinic in an evolving economy: West Virginia. While the clinic had entrepreneurial clients, those clients had developed little intellectual property. This chapter takes a closer look at the chicken-and-egg problem of knowledge development in an evolving economy, and concludes that law clinics can only support IP growth - they cannot create it on their own. The chapter then generalizes from the experience to suggest ways that law clinics can support …