Law Commons^™

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Georgia Law Review

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

Code Revision Commission V. Public.Resource.Org And The Fight Over Copyright Protection For Annotations And Commentary, David E. Shipley

Georgia Law Review

This Article analyzes Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org, a 2018 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit applied the public edicts doctrine and held that Georgia’s copyright on the annotations, commentary, and analyses in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is invalid. The U.S. Supreme Court granted Georgia’s Petition for a Writ of Certiorari on June 24, 2019. About a third of states claim copyright in the annotations to their codes, so the potential impact of this decision is substantial.

This Article’s thesis is that the Eleventh Circuit was wrong and should be reversed. It …

Branding Taxation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Georgia Law Review

Branding is important not only to businesses, but also to the economy. The intellectual property laws and tax laws should thus further the legitimate goals of encouraging and protecting brand investments while maintaining a sound tax base. Intellectual property protections for branding depend on advertisement and enforcement, both of which demand significant amounts of private investment by firms. Although one would expect similar tax treatments of both categories of investment, the categories are actually treated as vastly different for federal income tax purposes. Under the current tax system, advertising costs incurred to foster brand equality are generally expensed whereas litigation …

(Don't) Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose: State Law Copyright Protection Of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings In Blank-Slate Jurisdictions Like Georgia, Payton M. Bradford

Georgia Law Review

The issue of pre-1972 sound recordings-devoid of federal copyright protection-has emerged as an important legal issue with changes in how musicians are collecting royalties for music. Sound recordings have a complicated and fragmented history under United States copyright law. While recognized as a separate form of creative work from musical compositions since the early twentieth century, they nonetheless remained unprotected as separate works under federal law until 1972. Any sound recordings fixed prior to February 15, 1972, however, remain unprotected under federal law and are subject to common law copyright or state statutes. A majority of states, including Georgia, lack …

Using Reasonable Royalties To Value Patented Technology, David 0. Taylor

Georgia Law Review

In the last several years, commentators have expressed serious concerns with the state of the law governing awards of reasonable royalties as damages in patent infringement cases. Given these concerns, the proper assessment of royalties has been a recent, frequent topic for debate among economists and legal scholars. At the same time, all three branches of the federal government have studied ways to improve the law governing reasonable royalties. In this Article, I reframe the ongoing debate by identifying and exploring two basic paradigms for calculating reasonable royalties: valuing patent rights and valuing patented technology. The traditional paradigm, valuing patent …

Protect Yourself: Why The Eleventh Circuit's Approach To Sanctions For Protective Order Violations Fails Litigants, Adam J. Fitzsimmons

Georgia Law Review

Litigants commonly struggle to balance the need to comply with discovery requests and the desire to protect valuable trade secrets. Protective orders to help strike that balance. Questions arise, however, when one of the parties violates that protective order and discloses the opponent's confidential information. Chiefly, what remedies are available for a party whose invaluable intellectual property has been disclosed? At least one circuit has held the most common sanction, payment of attorney's fees, is unavailable for a violation of a protective order. Generally, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(b)(2) governs sanctions for violations of discovery orders, but the text …

The Great Bankrupt Divide: Amending The Rights Of Trademark Licensees Under The Code, Sumner R. Pugh Iv

Georgia Law Review

The federal circuit courts are split over whether a licensee has the right to continue using a licensed trademark after the license is rejected in bankruptcy. In Sunbeam Products, Inc. v. Chicago American Manufacturing, LLC, the Seventh Circuit held that rejection does not abrogate the licensee's right to use the licensed trademark, a decision that expressly rejects the Fourth Circuit's contrary holding that rejection ends a licensee's right to use the licensed mark. While this Note argues that the Fourth Circuit interpreted and applied the Bankruptcy Code accurately in Lubrizol Enterprises v. Richmond Metal Finishers, it finds that the effect …

Darkness On The Edge Of Town: How Entitlements Theory Can Shine A Light On Termination Of Transfers In Sound Recordings, Matthew Vincent H. Noller

Georgia Law Review

When Congress overhauled the Copyright Act in 1976, it
created the device of termination of transfers to protect
authors of copyrighted works from unremunerative
transfers. The scheme seemed straightforward, but
technology has created problems the Act's drafters never
could have anticipated. In particular, the application of
termination of transfers to sound recordings in 1976 was
little more than a shadow of uncertainty not worth dealing
with at the time. But that shadow has become a creeping
darkness, and no one seems sure how to clear it.
Now the darkness is here. Next year, artists like Bruce
Springsteen and Bob Dylan …

Not So Obvious After All: Patent Law's Nonobviousness Requirement, Ksr, And The Fear Of Hindsight Bias, Glynn S. Lunney Jr., Christian T. Johnson

Georgia Law Review

Before the creation of the Federal Circuit in 1982,
nonobviousness served as the primary gatekeeper for
patents. When patent holders sued for infringement and
lost, more than sixty percent of the time, they lost on the
grounds that their patent was obvious. With the advent of
the Federal Circuit, nonobviousness became a much less
difficult hurdle to surmount. From 1982 until 2005, when
patent holders sued for infringement and lost, obviousness
was the reason in less than fifteen percent of the cases.
While obviousness remained formally a requirement of
patent protection, there can be little doubt that the Federal
Circuit …