Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

What Is Cultural Misappropriation And Why Does It Matter? 03-31-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, like enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods LLC illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically …

District Court: Cambridge Univ. Pr. Et Al. V. Becker Et Al.: Ruling On Remand (2016), Orinda Evans

Georgia State University Copyright Lawsuit

No abstract provided.

11th Circuit Court Of Appeals: Cambridge Univ. Press V. Patton, Opinion (2014), 11th Circuit Court Of Appeals

Georgia State University Copyright Lawsuit

No abstract provided.

What Patent Attorney Fee Awards Really Look Like, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This essay gives an empirical account of attorney fee awards over the last decade of patent litigation. Given the current attention in legislative proposals and on the Supreme Court’s docket to more liberal fee shifting as a check on abusive patent litigation, a fuller descriptive understanding of the current regime is of utmost importance to forming sound patent litigation policy. Following a brief overview of judicial experience in patent cases and trends in patent case filing, this study presents analysis of over 200 attorney fee award orders during 2003-2013.

The study confirms the commonsense view that plaintiffs have tended to …

Against Settlement Of (Some) Patent Cases, Megan M. La Belle

Scholarly Articles

For decades now, there has been a pronounced trend away from adjudication and toward settlement in civil litigation. This settlement phenomenon has spawned a vast critical literature beginning with Owen Fiss’s seminal work, Against Settlement. Fiss opposes settlement because it achieves peace rather than justice, and because settlements often are coerced due to power and resource imbalances between the parties. Other critics have questioned the role that courts play (or ought to play) in settlement proceedings, and have argued that the secondary effects of settlement – especially the lack of decisional law – are damaging to our judicial system. Still, …

Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court's recent interest in patentable subject matter has had several, unexpected downstream effects on preliminary injunctions in patent disputes.

The Supreme Court has recently expressed increased interest in patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, the doctrine that limits the types of inventions eligible for patenting. Its two decisions, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., in 2012, and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., in 2013, represented the first broad restrictions on patentable subject matter in over thirty years. And later this term, the Court will decide yet another patent eligibility case: Alice Corp. v. CLS …

Certain Patents, Alan C. Marco, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents the first in a series of studies of stock market reactions to the legal outcomes of patent cases. From a sample of patents litigated during a 20-year period, we estimate market reactions to patent litigation decisions and to patent grants. These estimates reveal that the resolution of legal uncertainty over patent validity and patent infringement is, on average, worth as much to a firm as is the initial grant of the patent right. Each is worth about 1.0-1.5% excess returns on investment. There are significant differences between such market reactions before and after the establishment in 1982 …

The Patent Litigation Explosion, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first look at patent litigation hazards for public firms during the 1980s and 1990s. Litigation is more likely when prospective plaintiffs acquire more patents, when firms are larger and technologically close and when prospective defendants spend more on research and development ("R&D"). The latter suggests inadvertent infringement may be more important than piracy. Public firms face dramatically increased hazards of litigation as plaintiffs and even more rapidly increasing hazards as defendants, especially for small public firms. The increase cannot be explained by patenting rates, R&D, firm value or industry composition. Legal changes are the most likely …

The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.

District Court: Final Order (2012), Orinda Evans

Georgia State University Copyright Lawsuit

No abstract provided.

District Court: Cambridge Univ. Press V. Becker - Ruling (2012), Orinda Evans

Georgia State University Copyright Lawsuit

Ruling from the District Court

Cambridge Univ. Press v. Becker, 863 F. Supp. 2d 1190 (N.D. Ga. 2012)

Gat, Solvay, And The Centralization Of Patent Litigation In Europe, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Whose Rules Rule? Federal Circuit Review Of Divergent Uspto And District Court Decisions, Lisa Dolak

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

The potential utility of reexamination in the context of patent litigation has caught the attention of litigants, commentators, and the courts. However, concurrent litigation and reexamination proceedings proceed independently. Thus, in any given situation involving such proceedings, there is the possibility that the Federal Circuit will encounter issues in appeals from determinations of the district court and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office relating to the scope or validity of the same patent claims, which issues have traveled to the court on separate tracks. And, because the courts and the USPTO approach claim construction and validity determinations differently, they can …

Joint Defense Or Research Joint Venture? Reassessing The Patent-Challenge-Bloc's Antitrust Status, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

A patent challenger who defeats a patent wins spoils that it must share with the world, including all its competitors. This forced sharing undercuts an alleged infringer's incentive to stay in the fight to the finish - especially if the patent owner offers an attractive settlement. Too many settlements, and too few definitive patent challenges, are the result. I have argued previously that a litigation-stage bounty would help correct this tilt against patent challenges, for it would provide cash prizes to successful patent challengers that they alone would enjoy. Even the best-designed bounty, however, would likely fail to encourage patent …

Lawyers Acting Badly, Or Not? Misconduct In Ip Litigation: Recent Examples And The Questions They Raise, Lisa Dolak

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Misconduct in civil litigation is not a new phenomenon. Nor is it confined to particular types of cases. Because of their characteristic intensity. however, intellectual property cases may be more likely to inspire bad behavior than other types of cases. The associated pressures seem, on occasion, to lead litigants and trial lawyers to succumb to the temptation to step outside the bounds of vigorous advocacy.

Trial and appellate judges in a number of recent IP cases have wrestled with the issue of whether certain litigation tactics crossed the line between advocacy and abuse. For example, trial judges have recently rebuked …

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 …

Peer To Patent: Collective Intelligence And Intellectual Property Reform, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Lessons For Patent Policy From Empirical Research On Patent Litigation, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reviews empirical patent litigation research to reveal patent policy lessons. First, the Article presents facts about patent litigation. Next, it analyzes the patent premium. Patent litigation research reveals little about the magnitude of the patent premium, but the research reveals the strategies firms use to capture the patent premium and the patent policy instruments that determine the patent premium. Next, the Article evaluates the patent prosecution process and notes that making efforts to refine a patent application can affect the value of the patent. The Article then identifies reforms for improving PTO performance. Finally, the Article discusses policy …

Controlling Opportunistic And Anti-Competitive Intellectual Property Litigation, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

It is useful to think of intellectual property (IP) law both as a system of property rights that promotes the production of valuable information and as a system of government regulation that unintentionally promotes socially harmful rent-seeking. This Article analyzes methods of controlling rent-seeking costs associated with opportunistic and anti-competitive IP lawsuits. My thinking is guided to some extent by the analysis of procedural measures for controlling frivolous litigation, and analysis of antitrust reforms designed to control strategic abuse of antitrust law. These analogies lead me to focus on pre-trial and post-trial control measures that reduce the credibility of weak …

Symposium: Patent Rights And Licensing, Michael S. Baram, Ashley Stevens, Thomas Meyers, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This panel will discuss intellectual property - the patent incentive, patentability issues, licensing, and litigation-related matters. It will be moderated by Dr. Ashley Stevens, the Director of the Office of Technology Transfer at Boston University. Ashley has multiple degrees, including a doctorate in physical chemistry from Oxford University. He has worked in the biotech industry for a number of years, mostly with startup companies and academic research organizations such as the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where he was also Director of Technology Transfer. Ashley was instrumental in the startup and operations of firms such as Biotechnica International, and started his …