Law Commons^™

Brief Of The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Charles Duan

Amicus Briefs

It is a common but misleading premise of cases such as this one that the disappointed patent applicant has two options for judicial review: a 35 U.S.C. § 145 district court action and an appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 141. The applicant also has a non-judicial option: administrative remedies within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

These administrative remedies add an important dimension to this case. The Court of Appeals adopted what it conceded was an atextual construction of § 145 expense recovery provision in order to ensure that § 145 actions were not cost-prohibitive to “small businesses and individual …

Is Dna Really A Natural Product? It's Time To Separate Fact From (Legal) Fiction: An Examination Of Dna Patentability As A Biological Algorithm In The Post-Myriad Era, Nicholas Ulen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court delivered its landmark decision in Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., holding isolated DNA unpatentable, thereby invalidating the claims of thousands of DNA patents in the process. The opinion, delivered by Justice Thomas, reasoned that the act of separating DNA from the body did not sufficiently transform the molecule beyond what naturally exists. Yet the Court found that line to be crossed when it held certain artificially synthesized complementary DNA molecules coding for the exact same gene patentable. Unlike the Federal Circuit, the Court focused its analysis not on the …

The Football As Intellectual Property Object, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

The histories of technology and culture are filled with innovations that emerged and took root by being shared widely, only to be succeeded by eras of growth framed by intellectual property. The Internet is a modern example. The football, also known as the pelota, ballon, bola, balón, and soccer ball, is another, older, and broader one. The football lies at the core of football. Intersections between the football and intellectual property law are relatively few in number, but the football supplies a focal object through which the great themes of intellectual property have shaped the game: origins; innovation and …

Attacking Innovation, Jeffrey A. Maine

Faculty Publications

Economists generally agree that innovation is important to economic growth and that government support for innovation is necessary. Historically, the U.S. government has supported innovation in a variety of ways: (1) a strong legal system for patents; (2) direct support through research performed by government agencies, grants, loans, and loan guarantees; and (3) indirect support through various tax incentives for private firms. In recent years, however, we have seen a weakening of the U.S. patent system, a decline in direct funding of research, and a weakening of tax policy tools used to encourage new innovation. These disruptive changes threaten the …

Brief For The R Street Institute As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Charles Duan

Amicus Briefs

The government and its agencies should be treated as a “person” that may petition to institute post-issuance review proceedings under the America Invents Act, for two reasons. First, permitting the government to seek review of patents under these proceedings best realizes the intent of Congress to make those proceedings widely available. Second, compared to the government’s alternative option for administratively challenging patents, AIA post-issuance review better serves important norms of procedure and governance, including transparency, due process, and separation of functions.

In The Shadow Of The Law: The Role Of Custom In Intellectual Property, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

Custom, including industry practices and social norms, has a tremendous influence on intellectual property (“IP”) law, from affecting what happens outside of the courts in the trenches of the creative, technology, and science-based industries, to influencing how courts analyze infringement and defenses in IP cases. For decades, many scholars overlooked or dismissed the impact of custom on IP law in large part because of a belief that the dominant statutory frameworks that govern IP left little room for custom to play a role. In the last ten years, however, the landscape has shifted and more attention has been given to …