Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Uneasy Case For Patent Federalism, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Nationwide uniformity is often considered an essential feature of the patent system, necessary to fulfill that system’s disclosure and incentive purposes. In the last few years, however, more than half the states have enacted laws that seek to disrupt this uniformity by making it harder for patent holders to enforce their patents. There is an easy case to be made against giving states greater authority over the patent system: doing so would threaten to disrupt the system’s balance between innovation incentives and a robust public domain and would permit rent seeking by states that disproportionately produce or consume innovation.

There …

Tagmarks, Alexandra J. Roberts

Law Faculty Scholarship

From Kentucky Fried Chicken’s #HowDoYouKFC campaign to viral fundraiser #IceBucketChallenge to Instagram phenomenon #TBT, hashtags as trademarks — I call them “tagmarks” — are having a moment. Given the resources that brands invest in marketing via social media, and specifically in choosing and using hashtags, it’s not surprising that some players have begun to seek federal trademark registration for those hashtags. By the end of 2015, companies had successfully registered two hundred tagmarks and sought protection for over a thousand others; the US Trademark Office granted more tagmark registrations in that year than it did in every previous year combined. …

Antimicrobial Resistance (Amr) And Multidrug Resistance (Mdr): Overview Of Current Approaches, Consortia And Intellectual Property Issues, Andrew Jenner, Niresh Bhagwandin, Stanley P. Kowalski

Law Faculty Scholarship

The supply of new diagnostics and treatments is insufficient to keep up with the increase in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and multidrug resistance (MDR) as older medicines are used more widely and microbes develop resistance to them. At the same time, significant quantities of antibiotics are used on patients and animals that do not need them, while others who do need them lack access.

Effective responses to AMR/MDR require effort by both the public and private sectors to develop and disseminate new diagnostics, vaccines and treatments on a global scale, as well as to adapt them to local needs. This calls …