Law Commons^™

Strangers In A Strange Land: Specialized Courts Resolving Patent Disputes, Lawrence M. Sung

Faculty Scholarship

As the number of cases and disputes involving proprietary technology subject to intellectual property rights has increased in recent years, a decades-old view that such matters should be adjudicated exclusively by specialized courts and judges has experienced a renaissance. This call for specialized, or problem-solving, courts at both the federal and state levels is not unique to the intellectual property field, however. Indeed, there has been a significant movement over the past several years to establish specialized drug courts, community courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts. One common element among these efforts is the idea that specialized courts …

Acquiring Innovation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

In recent years, the innovation market has witnessed a new business model involving companies that are mere patent holding shells and not operating entities. They have no customers or products to offer, but they do have an aggressive tactic of using patent portfolios to threaten other operating companies with potential infringement litigation. The strategy is executed with the end goal of extracting handsome settlements. Acquisitions of patents for offensive use have become a major concern to operating companies because such acquisitions pose the threats of patent injunction, interrupting the business and crippling further innovation.

While many operating companies today know …

Billowing White Goo, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The title of this symposium is the question: "Fair Use: "Incredibly Shrinking" or Extraordinarily Expanding?" I'd argue that the answer to the question is "no." Fair use isn't doing either. The size of the fair use footprint has stayed remarkably constant over the past 30 or even 50 years. What has expanded, extraordinarily, is the size of rights granted by the copyright law. It may seem as if fair use is either expanding or shrinking, because the greater reach of copyright has made a bunch of uses potentially fair that weren't even potentially infringing 50 years ago. In order to …