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Full-Text Articles in Law
R&D Spending And Patenting In The Technology Hardware Sector In Nations With And Without Fair Use, Michael Palmedo
R&D Spending And Patenting In The Technology Hardware Sector In Nations With And Without Fair Use, Michael Palmedo
Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series
This working paper uses two common indicators of innovation to see how the technology hardware sector compares in countries with and without fair use. It illustrates that research and development spending by firms in these industries has been higher in countries with fair use, controlling for other firm- and country-level factors. It then shows more patents have been granted to the technology sector in countries that have adopted fair use, relative to patents granted to firms in the same industries in other countries, controlling for other country-level factors.
Patent Injunctions On Appeal: An Empirical Study Of The Federal Circuit's Application Of Ebay, Christopher B. Seaman, Ryan T. Holte
Patent Injunctions On Appeal: An Empirical Study Of The Federal Circuit's Application Of Ebay, Christopher B. Seaman, Ryan T. Holte
Scholarly Articles
More than ten years after the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in eBay v. MercExchange, the availability of injunctive relief in patent cases remains hotly contested. For example, in a recent decision in the long-running litigation between Apple and Samsung, members of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit divided sharply on whether an injunction was warranted to prevent Samsung from continuing to infringe several smartphone features patented by Apple. To date, however, nearly all empirical scholarship regarding eBay has focused on trial court decisions, rather than the Federal Circuit.
This Article represents the first …
The Field Of Invention, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
The Field Of Invention, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
Federal courts can ill afford to ignore, assume, or improvise a pervasively important administrative power that the Patent Office exercises regularly and effectively: technology classification. This agency-court asymmetry has persisted for decades but has now become unmanageably problematic for two related reasons. First, Supreme Court guidance, patent reform legislation, and academic commentary have all broadly rejected long-standing patent exceptionalism in administrative law, while making the Patent Office a major substitute for federal courts in resolving patent disputes. Still, patent doctrine has been slow to correct, particularly in judicial deference to agency action. Second, criticisms of the patent system are highly …
Razing The Patent Bar, William Hubbard
Razing The Patent Bar, William Hubbard
All Faculty Scholarship
Innovation is vital to economic prosperity, and lawmakers consequently strive to craft patent laws that efficiently promote the discovery and commercialization of new inventions. Commentators have long recognized that legal fees are a significant cost affecting innovation, but remarkably a crucial driver of these costs has largely escaped scrutiny: the Patent Bar. Every year innovators spend billions of dollars on legalfees for representation in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO"), where inventors apply for patents and potential infringers seek to invalidate issued patents. Supply in this essential legal services market, however, is sharply limited because patent law requires innovators …
Measuring The Costs And Benefits Of Patent Pools, Michael Mattioli, Robert P. Merges
Measuring The Costs And Benefits Of Patent Pools, Michael Mattioli, Robert P. Merges
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This Article addresses a policy question that has challenged scholars and lawmakers since the 1850s: Do the transaction cost benefits of patent pools outweigh their potential for consumer harm? This question has special importance today. Patent pools are on the increase, due to large numbers of patents in critical industries such as software and mobile phones. In this Article, we present the first empirically-based estimate of the transaction costs savings engendered by patent pools. Drawing on interviews with administrators of prominent pools, we document the costs of assembling and administering a functioning pool. We then estimate the transaction costs that …
Solving Ethical Puzzles To Unlock University Technology Transfer Client Work For An Intellectual Property Legal Clinic, Cynthia L. Dahl
Solving Ethical Puzzles To Unlock University Technology Transfer Client Work For An Intellectual Property Legal Clinic, Cynthia L. Dahl
All Faculty Scholarship
Intellectual property (IP) and technology legal clinics are experiencing an unprecedented surge in popularity. Before 2000 there were only five such clinics, but by 2016 there were seventy-four, with fifty added since 2010 alone. As law schools are approving new IP clinics and as practitioners are developing syllabi, there is an increasing need to share knowledge about models that work and how to avoid pitfalls.
One potentially fertile – but traditionally underutilized -- source of client work for an IP and technology clinic is the university technology transfer office (“TTO”), the department that protects, markets, and licenses all university intellectual …
Fair Use Is Good For Creativity And Innovation, Bill Patry
Fair Use Is Good For Creativity And Innovation, Bill Patry
Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series
Commenting on legal debates in other countries is usually bad manners. When, however, the debates concern a law from your own country, and that law is being misrepresented, it may be of service to set the record straight. The record, based on almost 300 years of Anglo-American case law and the experiences of those of us who apply fair use every day in our jobs, demonstrates that fair use is good for creativity and innovation, and in practice works well. You don’t have to take my word for it; if you are willing to put the time in, and have …
U.S. State Copyright Laws: Challenge And Potential, Marketa Trimble
U.S. State Copyright Laws: Challenge And Potential, Marketa Trimble
Scholarly Works
With copyright law in the United States lying primarily in the realm of federal law, the laws of the U.S. states concerning copyright do not typically attract significant attention from scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. Some recent events have drawn attention to state copyright laws – for example, litigation against a satellite radio provider for infringement of state common-law public performance rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. However, in general, state copyright laws remain largely in the shadow of federal copyright law, and state law is typically not viewed as a particularly useful vehicle for pursuing the policies that copyright law …
Enhancing Innovation In The Ugandan Agri-Food Sector: Progress, Constraints, And Possibilities, Travis Lybbert, Kritika Saxena, Julius Ecuru, Dick Kawooya, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent
Enhancing Innovation In The Ugandan Agri-Food Sector: Progress, Constraints, And Possibilities, Travis Lybbert, Kritika Saxena, Julius Ecuru, Dick Kawooya, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Software's Copyright Anticommons, Clark D. Asay
Software's Copyright Anticommons, Clark D. Asay
Faculty Scholarship
Scholars have long assessed “anticommons” problems in creative and innovative environments. An anticommons develops when an asset has numerous rights holders, each of which has a right to prevent use of the asset, but none of which has a right to use the asset without authorization from the other rights holders. Hence, when any one of those rights holders uses its rights in ways that inhibit use of the common asset, an anticommons may result.
In the software world, scholars have long argued that anticommons problems arise, if at all, because of patent rights. Copyright, on the other hand, has …
Trust: A Model For Disclosure In Patent Law, Ari Ezra Waldman
Trust: A Model For Disclosure In Patent Law, Ari Ezra Waldman
Articles & Chapters
How to draw the line between public and private is a foundational, first-principles question of privacy law, but the answer has implications for intellectual property, as well. This project is the first in a series of papers about first-person disclosures of information in the privacy and intellectual property law contexts, and it defines the boundary between public and non-public information through the lens of social science — namely, principles of trust.
Patent law’s “public use” bar confronts the question of whether legal protection should extend to information previously disclosed to a small group of people. I present evidence that shows …
Expired Patents, Trade Secrets, And Stymied Competition, W. Nicholson Price Ii
Expired Patents, Trade Secrets, And Stymied Competition, W. Nicholson Price Ii
Articles
Patents and trade secrecy have long been considered substitute incentives for innovation. When inventors create a new invention, they traditionally must choose between the two. And if inventors choose to patent their invention, society provides strong legal protection in exchange for disclosure, with the understanding that the protection has a limit: it expires twenty years from the date of filing. At that time, the invention is opened to the public and exposed to competition. This story is incomplete. Patent disclosure is weak and focuses on one technical piece of an invention—but that piece is often only a part of the …