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Level Of Skill And Long-Felt Need: Notes On A Forgotten Future, Joe Miller
Level Of Skill And Long-Felt Need: Notes On A Forgotten Future, Joe Miller
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The Supreme Court's KSR decision transforms the way we think about patent law's ordinary artisan. The ordinary artisan, the Supreme Court states, is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton. This transformation, which sweeps aside a contrary precept that had informed the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence for a generation, raises a key question: How do we fill out the rest of our conception, in a given case, of the ordinary artisan's level of skill at the time the invention was made? Reaching back to a large vein of case law typified by Judge Learned Hand's decisions about nonobviousness, …
Remixing Obviousness, Joseph S. Miller
Remixing Obviousness, Joseph S. Miller
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In April 2007, the Supreme Court, for the first time in 41 years, decided a case about the basic contours of patent law's nonobviousness standard. The case, KSR, upends 25 years of Federal Circuit jurisprudence, and on a legal requirement that every patent must satisfy. In this essay, I show how KSR dismantles two predicates that have long shaped Federal Circuit nonobviousness cases - namely, the intertwined premises that hindsight-driven distortion is the gravest risk to an accurate nonobviousness requirement, and that the person of ordinary skill in the art (from whose perspective nonobviousness is judge) is singularly uncreative. In …
Making Much Ado About Theory: The Chinese Trademark Law, Leah Chan Grinvald
Making Much Ado About Theory: The Chinese Trademark Law, Leah Chan Grinvald
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Although the United States has had an active hand in the implementation of trademark law in China over the past century, the same frustrations that marked the turn of the twentieth century are reflected in the twenty-first century. This Article posits that one of the reasons that the United States has not seen the desired level of progress in China's protection of trademarks lies in the imposition of an American theory of trademarks, which has inhibited U.S. reform efforts in China to date. This imposition is understandable, as little thought has been given to the Chinese theoretical justification for their …
Identical Cousins? On The Road With Dilution And The Right Of Publicity, Mary Lafrance
Identical Cousins? On The Road With Dilution And The Right Of Publicity, Mary Lafrance
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The dilution doctrine and the right of publicity have a great deal in common, because both represent property-like rights that have evolved from legal doctrines largely unrelated to property concerns. Although both doctrines have engendered controversy in the United States, the dilution doctrine generally evokes greater skepticism and confusion. This Article evaluates how these concepts are viewed in a number of jurisdictions outside the United States. From this examination, two conclusions emerge. First, despite the similarities between the doctrines, countries do not tend to adopt or reject them in tandem. Second, the degree to which each doctrine achieves widespread and …