Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.

This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …

Federal Trademark Remedies: A Proposal For Reform, Mark A. Thurmon

Akron Intellectual Property Journal

It is time to take this problem seriously and reform the remedial rules of the Lanham Act. This article presents a specific proposal for reform that includes the following key changes:

• statutory damages are available as an alternative to actual damages, and this new remedy is available to prevailing trademark owners in all actions under the Lanham Act;
• the defendant's profits remedy is limited to those profits attributable to the infringement, but this remedy is available to prevailing trademark owners in all actions under the Lanham Act (i.e., proof of willful infringement or some other type of bad faith is …

Patent Litigation In China: Protecting Rights Or The Local Economy?, Brian J. Love, Christian Helmers, Markus Eberhardt

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Though it lacked a patent system until 1985, China is now the world leader in patent filings and litigation. Despite the meteoric rise of the Chinese patent system, many in the West believe that it acts primarily to facilitate local protectionism rather than innovation. Recent high-profile patent suits filed by relatively unknown Chinese firms against high-profile foreign tech companies, like Apple, Samsung, and Dell, have only added fuel to the fire. Surprisingly, given how commonplace assertions of Chinese protectionism are, little empirical evidence exists to support them. This Article contributes to the literature on this topic by analyzing five years …

A Comparative Study Of Patent Infringement Remedies Related To Non-Practicing Entities In The Courts Of Canada, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Aleksandar Nikolic

LLM Theses

This work examines the scope of non-practicing entity behavior and whether the debate on remedies can lead to changes that encourage the goals behind a patent system. Innovation is often the stated goal but the significance of innovation commercialization is often ignored. Furthermore, there has been an increase in business models that involve alternate means of monetizing patents, not all of which were contemplated in the purpose of the patent system. Using the goals of the patent system as a backdrop, this work provides an overview of the impact of remedies available to courts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and …

Harm To Competition Or Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters …

States Escape Liability For Copyright Infringement?, Michelle V. Francis

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Secret In One District Is No Secret In Another: The Cases Of Merrill Lynch And Preliminary Injunctions Under The Faa , Anahit Tagvoryan

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Public policy favors protecting intellectual property in arbitration, and both Congress and the courts support, and in fact encourage, arbitration of intellectual property disputes. This support stems from the history of favoritism toward private arbitration agreements and other alternative dispute resolution in lieu of judicial adjudication. Because intellectual property disputes often involve commercial parties transacting business across state lines, arbitration is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). Availability of provisional remedies such as injunctions has also proven effective in the area of intellectual property disputes. However, unlike the option and process of private arbitration where there is little to …

Notice And Patent Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In private enforcement systems such as the one for patents, remedies perform the “public” function of determining the optimal amount of protection and deterrence. If every patent were properly granted and had just the right scope to incentivize innovation, then strict enforcement and harsh penalties for infringement would be a good idea. But in a world where too many patents are granted, their boundaries are often ambiguous and scope excessive, things are not so simple. The expected likelihood and magnitude of the penalty determines the number of infringement suits and the litigation resources that will be poured into them. As …

Bits, Ippas, Trips And Icsid: Justice For Some, Alphabet Soup For All, Christopher Wadlow

Christopher Wadlow

Examines the possibility that ICSID (the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes) might be a more favourable forum than the WTO for private party complaints of violations of the TRIPs Agreement, if the state conduct alleged to violate TRIPs amounted to expropriation or breach of the principle of fair and equitable treatment.

Indirect Infringement From A Tort Law Perspective, Charles W. Adams

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.