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Articles 1 - 30 of 128
Full-Text Articles in Law
Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes, Camilla A. Hrdy, Christopher B. Seaman
Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes, Camilla A. Hrdy, Christopher B. Seaman
Scholarly Articles
There is a substantial literature on noncompete agreements and their adverse impact on employee mobility and innovation. But a far more common restraint in employment contracts has been underexplored: confidentiality agreements, sometimes called nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). A confidentiality agreement is not a blanket prohibition on competition. Rather, it is simply a promise not to use or disclose specific information. Confidentiality agreements encompass trade secrets, as defined by state and federal laws, but confidentiality agreements almost always go beyond trade secrecy, encompassing any information the employer imparted to the employee in confidence.
Despite widespread use, confidentiality agreements have received little attention. …
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Faculty Scholarship
Trademark law exists to promote competition. If consumers know which companies make which products, they can more easily find the products they actually want to purchase. Trademark law has long treated “source significance”—the fact that a particular trademark is identified with a particular producer—as both necessary and sufficient for establishing a valid trademark. That is, trademark law has traditionally viewed source significance as the only necessary precondition for a trademark being pro-competitive. In this Article, we argue that this equation of source significance and pro-competitiveness is misguided. Some marks use words that are so closely connected with the product being …
Antitrust Interoperability Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust Interoperability Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Compelled interoperability can be a useful remedy for dominant firms, including large digital platforms, who violate the antitrust laws. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.
Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability” must be defined broadly. It can realistically include everything from “dynamic” interoperability that requires real time sharing of data and operations, to “static” interoperability which requires portability but not necessarily real time interactions. Also included are the compelled sharing of intellectual property or …
Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege
Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege
Faculty Scholarship
The relationship between competition and innovation is difficult to disentangle, as exogenous variation in market structure is rare. The 1952 breakup of Germany’s leading chemical company, IG Farben, represents such a disruption. After the Second World War, the Allies occupying Germany imposed the breakup because of IG Farben’s importance for the German war economy instead of standard antitrust concerns. In technology areas where the breakup reduced concentration, patenting increased strongly, driven by domestic firms unrelated to IG Farben. An analysis of patent texts shows that an increased propensity to patent does not drive the effect. Descriptively, IG Farben’s successors increased …
Swallowing The Rule: Why Ferc’S “Immediate Need Exemption” Frustrates Competitive And Climate-Smart Electricity Sector Transmission Planning Under Order No. 1000, Philip Killeen
Sustainable Development Law & Policy
No abstract provided.
Law Library Blog (March 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Blog (March 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Newsletters/Blog
No abstract provided.
Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers.
Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive …
Equalizing The Playing Field: The Time Has Come For Secondary Meaning In The Making In Small Restaurant Trade Dress Infringement Cases, John Pesek
Journal of Food Law & Policy
Imagine it is opening day for your first restaurant. It has taken months, if not years, to get to this point and you have spent a lot of money in developing the menu, artist style, and feel for the restaurant. A few months after the opening of your restaurant, a competing restaurant, right down the block from your restaurant, opens its doors; its menu and overall look are virtually indistinguishable from your restaurant. You are left wondering what remedies, if any, you have as a small restaurant owner. This was the case for Chef Rebecca Charles and her Pearl Oyster …
Antitrust And Competition Issues, Jorge L. Contreras
Antitrust And Competition Issues, Jorge L. Contreras
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
This Chapter offers a broad overview of the impact of U.S. antitrust laws on IP licensing and transactions. A basic understanding of antitrust law is critical to the analysis of IP licensing arrangements, whether concerning patents, copyrights or trademarks. This chapter offers a summary of the antitrust doctrines that arise frequently in IP and technology-focused transactions — price fixing and market allocation, resale price maintenance, tying, monopolization, refusals to deal, standard setting and pay-for-delay settlements, with coverage of the major cases and enforcement agency guidance. Antitrust issues also play a role in the analysis of joint ventures, which are discussed …
Competitive Harm From Vertical Mergers, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Competitive Harm From Vertical Mergers, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The antitrust enforcement Agencies' 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines introduce a nontechnical application of bargaining theory into the assessment of competitive effects from vertical acquisitions. The economics of such bargaining is complex and can produce skepticism among judges, who might regard its mathematics as overly technical, its game theory as excessively theoretical or speculative, or its assumptions as unrealistic.
However, we have been there before. The introduction of concentration indexes, particularly the HHI, in the Merger Guidelines was initially met with skepticism but gradually they were accepted as judges became more comfortable with them. The same thing very largely happened again …
Government-Sponsored Patent Monetizing Entities, Garry A. Gabison
Government-Sponsored Patent Monetizing Entities, Garry A. Gabison
The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law
Government-sponsored patent assertion entities have materialized all over the world. This article looks at the market failure associated with the patent system. These entities have an opportunity to address these market inefficiencies. But, these entities can damage the innovation more by decreasing competition and increasing protectionism. This article looks at three such entities and argues that the US could use such an entity.
Money That Costs Too Much: Regulating Financial Incentives, Kristen Underhill
Money That Costs Too Much: Regulating Financial Incentives, Kristen Underhill
Indiana Law Journal
Money may not corrupt. But should we worry if it corrodes? Legal scholars in a range of fields have expressed concern about “motivational crowding-out,” a process by which offering financial rewards for good behavior may undermine laudable social motivations, like professionalism or civic duty. Disquiet about the motivational impacts of incentives has now extended to health law, employment law, tax, torts, contracts, criminal law, property, and beyond. In some cases, the fear of crowding-out has inspired concrete opposition to innovative policies that marshal incentives to change individual behavior. But to date, our fears about crowding-out have been unfocused and amorphous; …
The Tethered Economy, Aaron K. Perzanowski, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Aniket Kesari
The Tethered Economy, Aaron K. Perzanowski, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Aniket Kesari
Faculty Publications
Imagine a future in which every purchase decision is as complex as choosing a mobile phone. What will ongoing service cost? Is it compatible with other devices you use? Can you move data and applications across de- vices? Can you switch providers? These are just some of the questions one must consider when a product is “tethered” or persistently linked to the seller. The Internet of Things, but more broadly, consumer products with embedded software, are already tethered. While tethered products bring the benefits of connection, they also carry its pathologies. As sellers blend hardware and software—as well as product …
Understanding "Balance" Requirements For Standards-Development Organizations, Jorge L. Contreras
Understanding "Balance" Requirements For Standards-Development Organizations, Jorge L. Contreras
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Most technical standards-development organizations (SDOs) have adopted internal policies embodying “due process” criteria such openness, balance of interest, consensus decision making and appeals. Yet these criteria lack a generally-accepted definition and the manner in which they are implemented varies among SDOs. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the principle that SDOs should ensure a balance of interests among their stakeholders. This article explores the origins and meaning of the balance requirement for SDOs. In doing so, it identifies four “tiers” of balance requirements, ranging from those required of all SDOs under applicable antitrust law, to those required of …
Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there …
How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence's Implicit Bias Problem, Amanda Levendowski
How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence's Implicit Bias Problem, Amanda Levendowski
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, we have seen an increase in examples of AI systems reflecting or exacerbating societal bias, from racist facial recognition to sexist natural language processing. These biases threaten to overshadow AI’s technological gains and potential benefits. While legal and computer science scholars have analyzed many sources of bias, including the unexamined assumptions of its often homogenous creators, flawed algorithms, and incomplete datasets, the role of the law itself has been largely ignored. Yet just as code and culture play significant roles in how AI agents learn about and act in the …
The Global Standards Wars: Patent And Competition Disputes In North America, Europe And Asia, Jorge L. Contreras
The Global Standards Wars: Patent And Competition Disputes In North America, Europe And Asia, Jorge L. Contreras
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Over the past decade there has been an increasing number of disputes concerning the enforcement and licensing of patents covering technical standards. These disputes have taken on a global character and often involve litigation in North America, Europe and Asia. And while many of the parties are the same in actions around the world, courts and governmental agencies in different jurisdictions have begun to develop distinctive approaches to some of these issues. Thus, while areas of convergence exist, national laws differ on important issues including the availability of injunctive relief for FRAND-encumbered SEPs, the appropriate method for calculating FRAND royalties, …
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Reasonable Patent Exhaustion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
A lengthy tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have ended when the Supreme Court held that the sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee seller’s rights to enforce restrictions on that article through patent infringement suits. Further, reversing the Federal Circuit, the parties cannot bargain around this rule through the seller’s specification of conditions stated at the time of sale, no matter how clear. No inquiry need be made into the patentee’s market power, anticompetitive effects, or other types of harms, whether enforcement of the condition is socially costly or …
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Stephen Yelderman
As a general rule, judges and scholars believe settlement is a good thing. But for nearly a century, the Supreme Court has said that patent litigation is categorically different, since it offers the chance to increase competition by freeing the public from the burdens of a monopoly. Based on this theory, and in the hopes of seeing more patent litigation fought to completion, the Court has overturned long-standing common-law doctrines, declined to enforce otherwise-valid contracts, and—in the recent case of Federal Trade Commission v Actavis, Inc—subjected patent settlements to scrutiny under the antitrust laws. Similar reasoning has resulted in legislative …
Using Data Exclusivity Grants To Incentivize Cumulative Innovation Of Biologics' Manufacturing Processes, Eric Lawrence Levi
Using Data Exclusivity Grants To Incentivize Cumulative Innovation Of Biologics' Manufacturing Processes, Eric Lawrence Levi
American University Law Review
No abstract provided.
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 …
Patent Protection For Crispr: An Elsi Review, Jacob S. Sherkow
Patent Protection For Crispr: An Elsi Review, Jacob S. Sherkow
Articles & Chapters
The revolutionary gene-editing technology, CRISPR, has raised numerous ethical, legal, and social concerns over its use. The technology is also subject to an increasing patent thicket that raises similar issues concerning patent licensing and research development. This essay reviews several of these challenges that have come to the fore since CRISPR’s development in 2012. In particular, the lucre and complications that have followed the CRISPR patent dispute may affect scientific collaboration among academic research institutions. Relatedly, universities’ adoption of “surrogate licensors” may also hinder downstream research. At the same time, research scientists and their institutions have also used CRISPR patents …
What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman
What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman
Journal Articles
Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system. This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of border-drawing that our IP system undertakes — identifying “useful” subject matter.
This aspect is critical because our IP system gives utility patent law pride of place and draws the boundaries of the other doctrines in large part to respect utility patent’s supremacy. Yet IP law’s sense …
Combating The Lure Of Impropriety In Professional Sports Industries: The Desirability Of Treating A Playbook As A Legally Enforceable Trade Secret, Rice Ferrelle
Journal of Intellectual Property Law
No abstract provided.
See Ya Later, Gator: Assessing Whether Placing Pop-Up Advertisements On Another Company's Website Violates Trademark Law, Kirsten M. Beystehner
See Ya Later, Gator: Assessing Whether Placing Pop-Up Advertisements On Another Company's Website Violates Trademark Law, Kirsten M. Beystehner
Journal of Intellectual Property Law
No abstract provided.
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Journal Articles
This Article is the first to seriously scrutinize the claim that patent challenges lead to increased competition. It identifies a number of conditions that must hold for a patent challenge to provide this particular benefit, and evaluates the reasonableness of assuming that the pro-competitive benefits of patent challenges are generally available. As it turns out, there are a number of ways these conditions can and regularly do fail. This Article synthesizes legal doctrine, recent empirical scholarship, and several novel case studies to identify categories of challenges in which the potential benefits for competition are smaller than previously thought or, in …
Perverse Innovation, Dan L. Burk
Perverse Innovation, Dan L. Burk
William & Mary Law Review
An inescapable feature of regulation is the existence of loopholes: activities that formally comply with the text of regulation, but which in practice avoid the desired outcome of the regulation. Considerable ingenuity may be devoted to exploiting regulatory loopholes. Where technological regulation is at issue, such ingenuity may often be devoted to developing new technology that avoids the regulation; such innovation may be termed “perverse” because it is directed to avoiding the regulation that prompted it. Nonetheless, in this Article I argue that such regulatory circumvention may result in socially beneficial innovation. Drawing on insights from innovation policy in the …
An Experimental Approach To The Study Of Social Norms: The Allocation Of Intellectual Property Rights In The Workplace, Yuval Feldman
An Experimental Approach To The Study Of Social Norms: The Allocation Of Intellectual Property Rights In The Workplace, Yuval Feldman
Journal of Intellectual Property Law
No abstract provided.
The Riddle Of The Mysterious Patent Dance Wrapped In An Enigma: Is The Patent Dance Of The Bpcia Optional Or Mandatory?, Dov Hirsch
Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal
Recently, the nature of one of the aspects of the Biosimilar, Price, Competition, and Innovation Act of 2009 (“BPCIA”) has been called into question: Is the “patent dance,” the structured patent dispute resolution process of the BPCIA, mandatory or optional? A mandatory patent dance requires a biosimilar applicant to comply with all its requirements, while an optional patent dance allows the biosimilar applicant to opt out of the entire dance if it so chooses. This question is important because it has the potential to affect that delicate balance of the BPCIA. This Note focuses on some of the consequential implications …
Brief Amici Curiae Of 37 Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petition For Certiorari, Mark A. Lemley, Mark Mckenna
Brief Amici Curiae Of 37 Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petition For Certiorari, Mark A. Lemley, Mark Mckenna
Court Briefs
This case presents two issues that justify this Court’s review.
First, the Federal Circuit upheld a finding of design patent infringement based on the very same Apple designs that it found functional under trade dress law. Such a counterintuitive outcome is possible because the Federal Circuit has constructed a highly constrained definition of functionality in design patent law, which is at odds with this Court’s precedent in both utility patent and trade dress cases. Coupled with its recent re-interpretation of the design patent infringement standard, the Federal Circuit’s approach to functionality makes it quite likely that defendants will be held …