Law Commons^™

Big Data, Patents, And The Future Of Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Big data has tremendous potential to improve health care. Unfortunately, intellectual property law isn’t ready to support that leap. In the next wave of data- driven medicine, black-box medicine, researchers use sophisticated algorithms to examine huge troves of health data, finding complex, implicit relationships and making individualized assessments for patients. Black-box medicine offers potentially immense benefits, but also requires substantial high investment. Firms must develop new datasets, models, and validations, which are all nonrivalrous information goods with significant spillovers, requiring incentives for welfare-optimizing investment. Current intellectual property law fails to provide adequate incentives for black- box medicine. The Supreme Court …

Manufacturing Barriers To Biologics Competition And Innovation, W. Nicholson Price Ii., Arti K. Rai

Articles

As finding breakthrough small-molecule drugs becomes more difficult, drug companies are increasingly turning to "large molecule" biologics. Although biologics represent many of the most promising new therapies for previously intractable diseases, they are extremely expensive. Moreover, the pathway for generic-type competition set up by Congress in 2010 is unlikely to yield significant cost savings. This Article provides a fresh diagnosis of and prescription for this major public policy problem. It argues that the key cause is pervasive trade secrecy in the complex area of biologics manufacturing. Under the current regime, this trade secrecy, combined with certain features of Food and …

Patented Electric Guitar Pickups And The Creation Of Modern Music Genres, Sean M. O'Connor

Articles

This Essay provides an overview of how patents played a core role in developing world-changing musical genres. This may be surprising, as normally copyright law is associated with incentivizing advances in the creative arts. But as this Conference’s theme [The IP Platform: Supporting Invention and Inspiration] and presentations emphasize, the whole range of intellectual property (“IP”), especially when viewed as a platform, supports innovation across the spectrum of human ingenuity and creativity.

This Essay is also intended to be read in conjunction with a viewing of the live-music demonstration of how pickups transformed popular music, delivered at the Conference and …