Law Commons^™

Comment: An Examination Of The Impact Of Malpractice Law On Telepsychiatry Clinicians & Clients With Suicidal Ideations, Tristan Serri

Akron Law Review

It has been said numerous times that the law runs five years behind technology. Although this lag frequently causes numerous difficulties in all aspects of law, this delay is even more impactful in telemedicine. While all fields of telemedicine are expanding rapidly across the United States, the majority of states and the federal government have not yet implemented proper laws and procedures to protect both providers of telemedicine and their patients. The dearth of needed protocols and protections is even more pronounced when examining the subfield of telepsychiatry.

In particular, the malpractice law surrounding telepsychiatry when dealing with patients with …

Human Capital As Intellectual Property? Non-Competes And The Limits Of Ip Protection, Viva R. Moffat

Akron Law Review

Non-compete agreements have become increasingly common in recent years, imposed on twenty to forty percent (or more) of employees in some industries, both in the knowledge-intensive fields where they might be expected but also in the service industries on low-wage workers. As non-competes have proliferated, they have become increasingly controversial. Much of the discussion revolves around whether the agreements help or hinder innovation and economic growth. While this is also accompanied by some concern about the effect of non-competes on employees, little attention has been paid to the fact that employers use non-competes as tools for protecting intellectual property and …

Trademark Boundaries And 3d Printing, Lucas S. Osborn

Akron Law Review

3D printing technology promises to disrupt trademark law at the same time that trademark law and policy sustain repeated criticism. The controversial growth of trademark law over the last century has yielded amorphous sponsorship and affiliation confusion issues and empirically fragile post-sale and initial-interest confusion theories, among others. Into this melee marches 3D printing technology, which dissociates the process of design from that of manufacturing and democratizes manufacturing. Rather than being embodied only in physical objects, design is embodied in digital CAD files that users can post and sell on the internet. The digitization of physical objects raises fundamental questions …

Charitable Trademarks, Leah Chan Grinvald

Akron Law Review

Charity is big business in the United States. In 2015, private individuals or entities donated over $350 billion, which accounted for approximately two percent of the gross domestic product in the United States. Even though this seems like big money, these donations were split among over 1.5 million organizations. And each year, the number of charitable organizations grows and therefore, the competition for public donations increases. In part to succeed in such competition, some charitable organizations have turned to branding and trademarks as a way to differentiate their entities and to encourage donations. Drawing from the for-profit branding and trademarking …

Redefining The Intended Copyright Infringer, Yvette Joy Liebesman

Akron Law Review

The contemporary copyright infringer is pretty much anyone who can get caught. Yet, who could be caught back when the Copyright Act of 1976 was enacted is just a subset of those who can be caught today—we had very different concepts about who was the intended target of an infringement action than who fits into that mold today. The advent and growth of cyberspace communication now makes it both easier to infringe and for IP owners, with very little effort, to capture infringers. The ability of individuals to both easily infringe and easily be found infringing has altered the IP …

Copyright Easements, Jason Mazzone

Akron Law Review

When authors assign the copyright in their work to publishers, some productive uses of the work are impeded. The author loses opportunities to use or to authorize others to use the work unless the publisher consents; the publisher does not permit all uses of the work that the author would like or that would benefit a consuming audience. Copyright easements can solve the problem. Under a system of copyright easements, an easement holder would have designated rights in a creative work that would permit uses of the work that would ordinarily require permission of the copyright owner. If the author …

Reconsidering Experimental Use, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss

Akron Law Review

In the years since the Supreme Court began to narrow the scope of patentable subject matter, uncertainties in the law have had a deleterious impact on several important innovation sectors, including, in particular, the life sciences industry. There are now initiatives to expand patentable subject matter legislatively. In this article, I suggest that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is an outgrowth of the concern that patents on fundamental discoveries impede scientific research. To deal with that issue, any measure to expand the subject matter of patenting should be coupled with a parallel expansion of defenses to infringement liability, including the restoration …

Patent Submission Policies, Ryan T. Holte

Akron Law Review

This Article focuses on the early stage of commercialization communication when a third-party inventor owns an invention protected by a patent that a manufacturer-commercializer may profit from producing—long before any allegation of infringement or litigation. These submission-review communications by unaffiliated third parties are covered by corporate policies known as “patent submission policies.” They are the figurative “front doors” to a company for any third-party inventor, crucial to the commercialization of inventions generally. Unfortunately, patent submission policies have thus far remained unstudied in legal academic scholarship.

This Article collects and analyzes the current variations of patent submission policies adopted by the …