Law Commons^™

Patents Exhaustion For The Exhausted Defendant: Should Parties Be Able To Contract Around Exhaustion In Settling Patent Litigation?, Samuel F. Ernst

Publications

The first sale doctrine provides that when a patent holder unconditionally authorizes another party to sell a patented item, the patent holder's right to exclude with respect to the patented item is "exhausted. " The licensee can then sell the patented item to a third party - a downstream purchaser - and the patent holder will not be able to sue the third party for patent infringement based on the resale or other use of that item. A principal animating policy behind the exhaustion doctrine is to prevent patent holders from receiving overcompensation for their patented inventions by, for example, …

Owning Oneself In A World Of Others: Towards A Paid-For First Amendment, David Franklyn, Adam Kuhn

Publications

The first Part of this Article charts a brief course through the history of the right of publicity and the First Amendment. The second Part studies the competing economic rights, their philosophical justifications, and their shortcomings. The third Part analyzes several major cases that dealt with the conflict of rights, criticizing the transformative use analysis as a proxy for economic value and explaining the shortfalls of the test. The fourth Part proposes a new theory of add-on value and a paid-for First Amendment.

The issue we identify is that a loosely defined doctrine of concurrent ownership (of the celebrity image) …

Trademarks As Search-Engine Keywords: Who, What, When, David Franklyn, David A. Hyman

Publications

Most Internet searches result in unpaid (organic or algorithmic) results, and paid ads. The specific ads that are displayed are dictated by the user's search terms ("keywords"). In 2004, Google began offering trademarks for use as keywords on an unrestricted basis, followed in due course by other search engines. Once that happened, any entity (including sellers of competing products) could have their ads appear in response to a search for the trademarked product. Trademark owners responded by filing more than 100 lawsuits in the United States and Europe, making the dispute the hottest controversy in the history of trademark law. …

Trademark Surveys: An Undulating Path, David Franklyn, Shari Seidman Diamond

Publications

When a plaintiff alleges trademark infringement or claims that false advertising is likely to confuse or deceive, the pivotal legal question is: how are consumers likely to perceive the mark or advertising? In the early days of trademark litigation, a parade of consumer witnesses, carefully selected by one of the parties to support a trademark claim, would testify about their reactions to a mark. That approach has given way to systematic survey evidence reflecting the responses of a substantial number of consumers selected according to an explicit sampling plan, asked the same questions, and unaware who sponsored the survey.

Part …

Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article suggests that uncertainty can actually be used to increase efficiency in the marketplace. In the music industry, the battle over terrestrial performance rights--that is, the right of a copyright holder to collect royalties for plays of a sound recording on terrestrial radio--has raged for decades. In June 2012, in a deal that circumvented the statutory license for sound recordings for the …

Copyright Crime And Punishment: The First Amendment's Proportionality Puzzle, Margot Kaminski

Publications

The United States is often considered to be the most speech-protective country in the world. Paradoxically, the features that have led to this reputation have created areas in which the United States is in fact less speech protective than other countries. The Supreme Court's increasing use of a categorical approach to the First Amendment has created a growing divide between the US. approach to reconciling copyright and free expression and the proportionality analysis adopted by most of the rest of the world.

In practice, the U.S. categorical approach to the First Amendment minimizes opportunities for judicial oversight of copyright. Consequently, …

The Capture Of International Intellectual Property Law Through The U.S. Trade Regime, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

For years, the United States has included intellectual property ("IP") law in its free trade agreements. This Article finds that the IP law in recent U.S. free trade agreements differs subtly but significantly from U.S. IP law. These differences are not the result of deliberate government choices, but of the capture of the U.S. trade regime.

A growing number of voices has publicly criticized the lack of transparency and democratic accountability in the trade agreement negotiating process. But legal scholarship largely praises the 'fast track" trade negotiating system. This Article reorients the debate over the trade negotiating process away from …

Machine Learning And Law, Harry Surden

Publications

This Article explores the application of machine learning techniques within the practice of law. Broadly speaking “machine learning” refers to computer algorithms that have the ability to “learn” or improve in performance over time on some task. In general, machine learning algorithms are designed to detect patterns in data and then apply these patterns going forward to new data in order to automate particular tasks. Outside of law, machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to automate tasks that were once thought to necessitate human intelligence — for example language translation, fraud-detection, driving automobiles, facial recognition, and data-mining. If performing …

The Marrakesh Treaty For Visually Impaired Persons: Why A Treaty Was Preferable To Soft Law, Margot E. Kaminski, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid

Publications

This paper addresses the debates leading up to the recently adopted international treaty on copyright exceptions for the visually impaired, the Marrakesh International Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled. This treaty was successfully adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in June 2013.

Leading up to the negotiation of this instrument, multiple UN member states pushed for the instrument to be negotiated as soft law instead of a treaty. We argue that making this instrument soft law would have precluded its success. WIPO thus correctly chose to …