Law Commons^™

The Vonage Trilogy: A Case Study In "Patent Bullying", Ted Sichelman

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article presents an in-depth case study of a series of infringement suits filed by “patent bullies.” Unlike the oft-discussed “patent trolls”—which typically sell no products or services and perform no R&D—patent bullies are large, established operating companies that threaten or institute costly patent infringement actions of dubious merit against smaller companies, usually in order to suppress competition or garner licensing fees. In an ideal world of high-quality patents and optimal patent licensing and litigation, infringement suits by aggressive incumbents would have a cleansing, almost Darwinian effect. Yet, defects and distortions in patent examination, licensing, and litigation—the very problems that …

The Curious Incident Of The Supreme Court In Myriad Genetics, Dan L. Burk

Notre Dame Law Review

Often what is not said is as significant as what is said. In its recent Myriad Genetics decision, the United States Supreme Court is curiously silent about the relationship between its holding in that case and the holding in its immediately previous patent subject matter case, Mayo v. Prometheus. This reticence is all the more puzzling given that the Court initially remanded Myriad to the lower courts for reconsideration in light of the Mayo holding. The Court’s silence regarding Mayo leaves uncertain the relationship between the “products of nature” doctrine that serves as the basis for the Myriad decision, and …

Constitutional Limits On Surveillance: Associational Freedom In The Age Of Data Hoarding, Deven R. Desai

Notre Dame Law Review

Protecting associational freedom is a core, independent yet unappreciated part of the Fourth Amendment. New surveillance techniques threaten that freedom. Surveillance is no longer primarily forward looking. Today, changing technology allows law enforcement and intelligence services to obtain the same, if not more, information about all of us by looking backward. This shift massively expands the government’s ability to examine, investigate, and deter exercise of the freedom of association.

Forward-looking surveillance has limits that don’t apply to backward-looking surveillance. Some limits are practical such as the cost to place a person in a car to follow a suspect. Some are …

Improving Patent Quality With Applicant Incentives, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Article offers an alternative approach to the widely recognized problem of low-quality patents being granted by the patent office. Traditional reforms have focused almost exclusively on making the patent office more effective at examination. This Article instead looks at patent quality from an applicant’s perspective, and evaluates how certain patent rules might be encouraging inventors to file higher or lower quality claims. It proposes a variety of reforms to take advantage of applicants’ existing interests in obtaining patents that are both broad enough to create infringing activity and narrow enough to be valid. The result is a distinctive set …

Rehabilitating The Property Theory Of Copyright's First Amendment Exemption, Tun-Jen Chiang

Notre Dame Law Review

A continuing controversy in copyright law is the exemption of copyright from First Amendment scrutiny. The Supreme Court has justified the exemption based on history and the intentions of the Framers, but this explanation is unpersuasive on the historical facts.

There is an alternative explanation: copyright is property, and private property is generally exempt from scrutiny under standard First Amendment doctrine. Many scholars have noted this theory, but they have been harshly dismissive towards it. For example, Mark Lemley and Eugene Volokh view the property theory as so clearly wrong as to be a “non sequitur,” because it supposedly implies …