Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Thirty-Ninth Annual Edward G. Donley Memorial Lectures: The Art Of Censorship, Amy Adler

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Keynote Address, John D. Feerick

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Privacy Versus The First Amendment: A Skeptical Approach, Solveig Singleton

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Taking A Step Beyond Maxwell To Tame The Doctrine Of Equivalents, Matthew C. Phillips

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Panel I: The Conflict Between Commercial Speech And Legislation Governing The Commercialization Of Public Sector Data, Robert Sherman, Paul Schwartz, Deirdre Mulligan, Steven Emmert

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Panel Ii: The Conflict Between Commercial Speech And Legislation Governing The Commercialization Of Private Sector Data, Jennifer Barrett, Evan Hendricks, Solveig Singleton, David Sobel

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Irving V. Penguin: Historians On Trial And The Determination Of Truth Under English Libel Law, Dennise Mulvihill

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Can Coppa Work? An Analysis Of The Parental Consent Measures In The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Joshua Warmund

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Coming Soon To Your State (But Not Ready For Prime Time): Ucita, James S. Heller

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Taking The Protection-Access Tradeoff Seriously, Harvey S. Perlman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and economics scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of both the nature of intellectual property rights generally and the features of individual intellectual property regimes. Indeed it is hard to imagine a field other than antitrust law that is so explicitly governed by economic thinking. In authorizing the copyright and patent systems, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution expressly incorporates a social welfare imperative as the basis for its grant of power.' Certainly economists and economically oriented legal academics have given the field the attention it is due.

I am far from being a sophisticated …

Strategic Disclosure In The Patent System, Douglas Lichtman, Scott Baker, Kate Kraus

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patent applications are evaluated in light of the prior art. What this means is that patent examiners evaluate a claimed invention by comparing it with what in a rough sense corresponds to the set of ideas and inventions already known to the public. This is done for three reasons. First, the comparison helps to ensure that patents issue only in cases where an inventor has made a non-trivial contribution to the public's store of knowledge. Second, it protects a possible reliance interest on the part of the public since, once an invention is widely known, members of the public might …

Of Green Tulips And Legal Kudzu: Repacking Rights In Subpatentable Innovation, J. H. Reichman

Vanderbilt Law Review

How to enable entrepreneurs to appropriate the fruits of their investments in cumulative and sequential innovation' without impeding follow-on innovation and without creating barriers to en- try has become one of the great unsolved puzzles that the law and economics of intellectual property rights needs to address as the new millennium gets underway. This Article draws briefly from my earlier works to identify some of the key historical difficulties en- countered in protecting small grain-sized innovations that do not rise to the level of "novel and nonobvious inventions" or "original and creative works of authorship." It then re-examines these difficulties …

Analyze This: A Law And Economics Agenda For The Patent System, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patent law as a field of academic study has benefited enormously from the attention of economists. Indeed, law professors are relative newcomers to the academic patent field, trickling in behind the economists in small but growing numbers as patent law evolves from an arcane, practitioner-taught specialty to a less marginal role in law school curriculums.' Yet considering the prominence of economists in academic discourse about the patent system, they have had relatively little impact on patent law and policy. One reason for this disparity between the role of economists in the academy and in policy arenas may be the indeterminacy …

The Pharmaceutical Industry And World Intellectual Property Standards, F. M. Scherer

Vanderbilt Law Review

When I was a high school student during the late 1940s, the first so-called "wonder drugs"-initially penicillin and then the broad-spectrum antibiotics such as tetracycline-were entering the U.S. market. From their profitable experience developing the broad- spectrum antibiotics, the leading pharmaceutical companies of America and Europe acquired a strong research orientation that led to a cascade of new therapeutic entities, including additional anti-infectives, vaccines, diuretics, and then other agents to reduce heart attack risks, tranquilizers, antidepressants, birth control pills, anti-fungal agents, immuno suppressants, corticosteroids, AIDS inhibitors, powerful pain relief agents, and many other agents effective against specific diseases. Thanks to …

Patent Policy Innovations: A Clinical Examination, Josh Lerner

Vanderbilt Law Review

On the domestic front, the dispute has centered on the question of whether the United States should honor commitments made in bi- lateral agreements with Japan to remove idiosyncratic features of its patent system. In particular, legislation to require the publication of pending patent applications and to grant awards to the party that is first to file for an award (as are the practices in most nations) have been fiercely debated in the past few congressional sessions. In the developing nations, the requirements for minimal levels of patent protection in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariff and …

Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights, Keith E. Maskus

Vanderbilt Law Review

When the Uruguay Round negotiations began in 1986, the subject of intellectual property rights ("IPRs") was completely unfamiliar to international trade economists. Presumably the area was ignored because global trade policy concerns had not moved into questions of domestic business regulation. Even today, readers will search in vain for serious treatments of the trade implications of exclusive rights to intellectual property ("IP") in international economics textbooks.

Despite this general inattention, a small but growing literature has emerged in which trade economists have framed specific questions and applied theory and statistical analysis to them. This literature has advanced the understanding of …

Who's Patenting What? An Empirical Exploration Of Patent Prosecution, John R. Allison, Mark A. Lemley

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patents are big business. Individuals and companies are obtaining far more patents today than ever before. Some simple calculations make it clear that companies are spending over $5 billion a year obtaining patents in the U.S.- to say nothing of the costs of obtaining patents elsewhere, and of licensing and enforcing the patents. There are a number of reasons why patenting is on the rise; primary among them are a booming economy and a shift away from manufacturing and capital-intensive industries towards companies with primarily intellectual assets. But whatever the reason, it is evident that many companies consider patents important. …

Judges, Juries, And Patent Cases - An Emprical Peek Inside The Black Box, Kimberly A. Moore

Michigan Law Review

The frequency with which juries participate in patent litigation has skyrocketed recently. At the same time, there is a popular perception that the increasing complexity of technology being patented (especially in the electronic, computer software, biological and chemical fields) has made patent trials extremely difficult for lay juries to understand. These developments have sparked extensive scholarly debate and increasing skepticism regarding the role of juries in patent cases. Juries have participated in some aspects of patent litigation since the enactment of the first patent statute in 1790, which provided for "such damages as shall be assessed by a jury." The …

Copyright And The Perfect Curve, Julie E. Cohen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Everyone agrees that the purpose of the copyright system is to promote progress.' At the same time, though, skepticism about the law's ability to define the substance of progress runs deep within copyright case law and theory. Legal decisionmakers and scholars have quite properly doubted their own ability to evaluate artistic or literary merit, and have worried that efforts to do so would result in an inappropriately elitist and conservative standard. In addition, there is room for substantial debate about whether the metaphor of forward motion leaves out other important measures of what "progress" is or might be. This agnosticism …

Market Hierarchy And Copyright In Our System Of Free Expression, Neil W. Netanel

Vanderbilt Law Review

If trends of the past two decades persist, a vast inequality of wealth may well become a fundamental, defining characteristic of political and social life in many Western democracies, particularly the United States.' Among its potentially pernicious effects, massive wealth disparity threatens the integrity of the democratic process. Liberal democracy aspires to political equality, which demands that opportunities to acquire and assert political power be widespread and broadly distributed. Political equality does not require economic equality. But political equality may be undermined by severe disparities of wealth. Absent preventive regulation, private wealth buys political power. It enables those with greater …

Elementary And Persistent Errors In The Economic Analysis Of Intellectual Property, Edmund W. Kitch

Vanderbilt Law Review

The literature on the economic analysis of intellectual property rights evidences a broad scholarly consensus on a number of central and important issues. First, intellectual property rights en- able economic actors to capture some of the benefits of the investment they make in establishing a good reputation, creating expressive works, and inventing new and improved technology. Absent intellectual property rights, copiers are free to take for themselves a significant part of the economic benefit generated by these types of investment and to undermine the incentive to make these in- vestments in the first place. Second, the investment activities induced by …

The Ftc As Internet Privacy Norm Entrepreneur, Steven Hetcher

Vanderbilt Law Review

This symposium explores the economic approach to intellectual property law. This Article concerns a particular type of intellectual good-personal data. Personal data is an increasingly important topic because of its connection to the issue of Internet privacy, which has recently taken center stage in the public policy arena.

Boiled down to its core, the Internet privacy debate is a debate about who should control personal data-Internet users (data subjects) or websites. The scope of website data collection practices is expanding dramatically, due in large part to technological advances such as cookies, Web-crawlers, and Web-cams. If Internet users are unable to …

Cruel, Mean, Or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination And Digital Intellectual Property, James Boyle

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches .... What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich .... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to third-class passengers and mean …

Comment On "Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights", Paul Goldstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

Copyright is the "dog that didn't bark" in Keith Maskus's paper, "Lessons from Studying the International Economics of Intellectual Property Rights." Like virtually every other economic study of intellectual property and trade, the Maskus paper confines its examples and analysis to the industrial side of intellectual property-mainly patents and know-how-and leaves the authorial side-copyright-untouched. As a small step toward repairing this imbalance, and toward opening a corner of policy inquiry that has so far been largely unexamined, I would like here to make a few observations on copyright and trade in developing economies.

The regular omission of copyright from economic …

Intellectual Property Rights And The New Institutional Economics, Robert P. Merges

Vanderbilt Law Review

When someone speaks of "the law and economics of intellectual property rights" (IPRs), an image along the lines of the following diagram is apt to come to mind: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Intellectual Property Law, U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) School of Law. For helpful comments, the author wishes to thank members of the Vanderbilt Law School Conference, "Taking Stock: The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property Rights," April, 2000. The usual disclaimer applies.

This is the basic illustration of monopoly price and output, familiar from introductory microeconomic texts. It is often used to explain the effects of …

An Unhurried View Of Private Ordering In Information Transactions, Yochai Benkler

Vanderbilt Law Review

We stand at an unprecedented moment in the history of exclusive private rights in information ("EPRIs").' Technology has made it possible, it seems, to eliminate to a large extent one aspect of what makes information a public good-its nonexcludability. A series of laws-most explicitly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and the Uniform Computers Information Transactions Act ("UCITA")-are building on new technologies for controlling individual uses of information goods to facilitate a perfect enclosure of the information environment.

The purpose of this Essay is to explain why economic justifications interposed in favor of this aspect of the enclosure movement are, …

Lessons From Studying The International Economics Of Intellectual Property Rights

Vanderbilt Law Review

When the Uruguay Round negotiations began in 1986, the subject of intellectual property rights ("IPRs") was completely unfamiliar to international trade economists. Presumably the area was ignored because global trade policy concerns had not moved into questions of domestic business regulation. Even today, readers will search in vain for serious treatments of the trade implications of exclusive rights to intellectual property ("IP") in international economics textbooks.

Despite this general inattention, a small but growing literature has emerged in which trade economists have framed specific questions and applied theory and statistical analysis to them. This literature has advanced the understanding of …

The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (Ucita): Still Not Ready For Prime Time, James S. Heller

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

The Best Things In Law Are Free?: Towards Quality Free Public Access To Primary Legal Materials In Canada, Teresa Scassa

Dalhousie Law Journal

In this article the author explores the move in several jurisdictions towards providing primary legal materials online without charge. In Canada the federal government, most provincial governments and many courts currently provide some form of online access to primary legal materials. However, this is not done in a unified, comprehensive or systematic manner. The author evaluates the "legal information institute" model as it has emerged in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and considers whether such a model would be useful or workable in Canada. In the course of this assessment, the author canvasses such issues as the …

Rethinking Patent Law In The Administrative State, Orin S. Kerr

William & Mary Law Review

This Article challenges the Supreme Court's recent holding that administrative law doctrines should apply to the patent system. The Article contends that the dynamics ofpatent law derive not from public law regulation, but rather from the private law doctrines of contract, property, and tort. Based on this insight, the Article argues that administrative law doctrines such as Chevron and the Administrative Procedure Act should not apply within patent law, and that such doctrines in fact pose a serious threat to the proper functioning of the patent system.