Law Commons^™

Intellectual Property And The End Of Work, Camilla Hrdy

Florida Law Review

The conventional wisdom is that intellectual property (IP) is good for jobs. Indeed, according to legislators and the U.S. patent office, IP “creates jobs.” But this is not quite right. A primary function of IP is to increase the amount of innovation in the economy. Yet a significant subset of the innovations protected by IP rights, from self-service kiosks to self-driving cars, are in fact labor-saving and indeed labor-displacing. They reduce the amount of paid human labor required to complete a task. Therefore, to the extent IP is successful at incentivizing innovation, IP actually contributes to job loss. More precisely, …

Staking The Boundaries Of Software Copyrights In The Shadow Of Patents, Pamela Samuelson

Florida Law Review

Ever since the venerable Supreme Court opinion in Baker v. Selden, courts and commentators have overwhelmingly endorsed the rule that copyright and utility patent protections for intellectual creations are mutually exclusive. That is, an intellectual creation may be eligible for copyright or utility patent protection, but not both. Original works of authorship are channeled to the copyright regime, while novel and nonobvious technologies are channeled to the patent system.

The well-established mutual exclusivity rule for copyright and utility patents was recently renounced, as applied to computer program innovations, by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in Oracle …

What If Artificial Intelligence Wrote This? Artificial Intelligence And Copyright Law, Victor M. Palace

Florida Law Review

The increasing sophistication and proliferation of artificial intelligence has given rise to a provoking question in copyright law: Who is the copyright owner of a work created by autonomous artificial intelligence? In other words, when a machine learns, thinks, and acts without human input, and it creates a work, what person should own the copyright, if any? This Note explains why this is a pressing question and why current laws and practices fail to address the issue. It then analyzes the arguments for and against the possible choices: the artificial intelligence, the user, the programmer, the company that owns the …

The Scope Of Ipr Estoppel: A Statutory, Historical, And Normative Analysis, Christa J. Laser

Florida Law Review

When Congress implemented inter partes review (IPR) and other patent post-grant proceedings through the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011, it provided that petitioners would be estopped in later proceedings from raising grounds for invalidity that they “raised or reasonably could have raised during that inter partes review.” 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2). However, substantial uncertainty in interpretation of this provision causes an enormous impact on an accused patent infringer’s decision of whether and on what grounds to petition for review. One reading of the statutory estoppel provision suggests that “during that inter partes review” refers to the …