Law Commons^™

Copyright And Parody: Touring The Certainties Of Intellectual Property And Restitution, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The essay that follows examines the boundary between two sets of rules. The first set arises under the law of Restitution, particularly the rule that volunteers ordinarily need not be rewarded. (Another way to state this same Restitution rule is to say that the retention of benefit voluntarily conferred is ordinarily not "unjust enrichment".) The second set of rules are those of Intellectual Property law, which creates property in a special kind of volunteer. My argument is simply that the law of Restitution leads almost directly to the law of Intellectual Property, though the two areas are premised on diametrically …

Response To Oliar And Stern: On Duration, The Idea/Expression Dichotomy, And Time, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Courts often use possession to determine who should own unclaimed resources. Yet, as Oliar and Stern demonstrate, the concept of possession is little more than a metaphor, capable of being applied to a broad range of phenomena. The authors helpfully deploy “time” as a metric to sort through the rules determining what should count as possession, and they survey the likely costs and benefits attached to choosing earlier versus later events as triggers for acquiring title.

With those tools in hand, Oliar and Stern employ “time” and the analogy of physical possession to address problems in copyright, patent, and trademark …

The Supreme Court Bar At The Bar Of Patents, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, a few dozen lawyers have come to dominate practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. By many accounts, these elite lawyers—whose clients are often among the largest corporations in the world—have spurred the Court to hear more cases that businesses care about and to decide those cases in favor of their clients. The Supreme Court’s recent case law on antitrust, arbitration, punitive damages, class actions, and more provides copious examples.

Though it is often overlooked in discussions of the emergent Supreme Court bar, patent law is another area in which the Court’s agenda has changed significantly …

Price Discrimination & Intellectual Property, Michael J. Meurer, Ben Depoorter

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and price discrimination may not be apparent to non-economists. We introduce economists to the many facets of intellectual property law that influence the profitability and practice of price discrimination. The law in this area has complex effects on customer sorting and arbitrage. Intellectual property law offers fertile ground for analysis of policies that facilitate or discourage price discrimination. …

Current Issues In Patent Law And Policy, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

Patent law and policy have received a surprising amount of attention from courts and policymakers in recent years. This attention is warranted because innovation policy is critical in determining the pace of innovation and the rate of economic growth. The reform proposals pending before Congress are motivated by widespread reports of abusive patent assertions and fears that patents sometimes stifle innovation. I favor most of the pending reforms and worry that our patent system, on balance, discourages innovation. But I part company from most reform proponents who focus on harms caused by the frivolous patent litigation mounted by many "non-practicing …

Draft Of The Concept Of "Harm" In Copyright - 2013, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

This essay examines the tort of copyright infringement. It argues that the ideas of "harm" and "fault" already play a role in the tort’s functioning, and that an ideally reformulated version of the tort should perhaps give a more significant role to “harm.” The essay therefore examines what “harm” can or should mean, reviewing four candidates for cognizable harm in copyright law (rivalry-based losses, foregone fees, loss of exclusivity, and subjective distress) and canvassing three philosophical conceptions of “harm” (counterfactual, historical-worsening, and noncomparative). The essay identifies the appropriateness vel non of employing, in the copyright context, each harm-candidate and each …