Science and Technology Law Commons^™

Uk Car-Flipping: The Vat Fraud Market-Place And Certified Solutions, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) fraud and its offspring carousel fraud and contra trading fraud are siphoning huge amounts of VAT revenue from the UK Treasury. This fraud is not a function of the goods involved. It is a function of the market-place. Recently another type of market-place dependent VAT fraud has taken hold in the UK - car-flipping.

In some instances the market-place where these frauds festers is a pre-existing or natural market-place, one that grows out of legitimate commercial practices. Fraudsters enter this market-place (so the argument goes) and take advantage of legitimate businesses who unwittingly get caught up …

Clarifying The Debate Over Therapeutic Forgetting, Adam J. Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What's Wrong With The Patent System? Fuzzy Boundaries And The Patent Tax, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The annual number of patent lawsuits filed in the U.S. has roughly tripled from 1970 to 2004. The number of suits was more or less steady in the 1970s, climbed slowly in the 1980s, and exploded in the 1990s. Why? The usual answers point to (1) the growth of the “new economy” and the concomitant explosion of patenting, (2) the failure of the Patent Office to reject patents on old or obvious inventions, or (3) the rise of the patent troll. There is an element of truth in all these answers, but even collectively they do a poor job explaining …

Imaging The Mind, Minding The Image: An Historical Introduction To Brain Imaging And The Law, Laura Stephens, Shahram Khoshbin

Faculty Scholarship

Since ancient times, people have yearned to attribute human behaviors to a physical source within the head. Recently, neuroimaging technologies have given us the technical ability to look at the living brain, its structures, and some of its functions without the need for invasive procedures. However, the science has a long way to go before these technologies can allow us fully to appreciate the anatomical and physiologic underpinnings of human thoughts, states of mind, motives, will, or behaviors.

In this Article, we use an historical overview to introduce the various new technologies for imaging the brain. Today, the goal of …

Some Principles Require Principals: Why Banning “Conflicts Of Interest” Won’T Solve Incentive Problems In Biomedical Research, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to bring greater discipline to the analysis of conflicts of interest in biomedical research, and by doing so to reveal trends and tensions in the research enterprise that require a more deliberate and longer term response. By comparing tensions in biomedical research to those affecting indisputably "relational" professionals such as lawyers, this Article concludes that "conflict of interest" is the wrong language to describe most of these situations, and leads to the wrong solutions. Conflict of interest analysis in law derives from an image of professional obligation running directly from expert agent to dependent principal. Because a …

An Empirical Look At Software Patents, James Bessen, Robert M. Hunt

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence …

Copyright In An Era Of Information Overload: Toward The Privileging Of Categorizers, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Technology, Competition, And Values, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Survey Of The Law Of Cyberspace: Electronic Contracting Cases 2006-2007, Juliet M. Moringiello, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

In this annual survey, we discuss the electronic contracting cases decided between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007. In the article, we discuss issues involving contract formation, procedural unconscionability, the scope of UETA and E-SIGN, and contracts formed by automated agents. We conclude that whatever doctrinal doubt judges and scholars may once have had about applying standard contract law to electronic transactions, those doubts have now been largely resolved, and that the decisions involving electronic contracts are following the general law of contracts pretty closely.

Technology, Competition, And Values, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Law can advance or retard the distributive effects of innovation and its diffusion in many ways. Certain technologies merit special monitoring because they promote the leveraging of economic advantage into social or cultural advantage without substantially increasing overall social welfare. Others threaten to undermine collective values and perceptions commonly used to evaluate technology. A final category threatens to do both, creating unfair or wasteful competition while blunting our capacity to recognize its morally dubious character.

As new sectors of life become more game-like and competitive, methods of leveling the playing field developed in sports and college admissions might become more …

Race-Ing Patents/Patenting Race: An Emerging Political Geography Of Intellectual Property In Biotechnology, Jonathan Kahn

Faculty Scholarship

This article applies insights from critical race theory to examine an emerging phenomenon in biotechnology research and product development. The strategic use of race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug approval. A dramatic rise in the use of race in biotechnology patents indicates that researchers and affiliated commercial enterprises are coming to see social categories of race as presenting opportunities for gaining, extending, or protecting monopoly market protection for an array of biotechnological products and services. Racialized patents are also providing the basis for similarly race-based clinical trial designs, drug development, capital raising and marketing strategies …

Contractual Expansion Of The Scope Of Patent Infringement Through Field-Of-Use Licensing, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

Patentees sometimes license their inventions through field-of-use licenses, which permit licensees to use the inventions, but only in specified ways. Field-of-use licensing is often procompetitive, because the ability to provide different licensing terms for different users can encourage broader licensing of inventions. But in recent United States cases, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and lower courts have upheld field-of-use licenses prohibiting activities that licensees would otherwise have been permitted by patent law, such as the repair and resale of patented products. The recent cases rely on the Federal Circuit's decision in Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., where the court …