Law Commons^™

The Federal Circuit As An Institution, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a unique institution. Unlike other circuit courts, the Federal Circuit’s jurisdiction is bound by subject area rather than geography, and it was created to address a unique set of problems specific to patent law. These characteristics have affected its institutional development and made the court one of the most frequently studied appellate courts. This chapter examines this development and describes the evolving qualities that have helped the Federal Circuit distinguish itself, for better or worse, as an institution.

This chapter begins with an overview of the concerns existing before creation of …

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 …

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 …

Frand Royalties, Anti-Suit Injunctions And The Global Race To The Bottom In Disputes Over Standards-Essential Patents, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

While national courts have long exercised extraterritorial authority over domestic entities whose conduct abroad is prohibited in the domestic jurisdiction, national courts have recently begun to use disputes over domestic patent rights as vehicles for shaping the global business arrangements of private parties even absent any violation of national law. This phenomenon has become particularly pronounced in the context of “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) licenses of patents that are essential to the manufacture and sale of standardized products. This essay explores the increasing extraterritorial effect of national judicial decisions on licenses for standards-essential patents, including recent instances in which …

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 …

Comparative Analysis Of Innovation Failures And Institutions In Context, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Many different legal and non-legal institutions govern and therefore shape knowledge production. It is tempting, given the various types of knowledge, knowledge producers, and systems with and within which knowledge and knowledge producers and users interact, to look for reductionist shortcuts — in general but especially in the context of comparative institutional analysis. The temptation should be resisted for it leads to either what Harold Demsetz called the Nirvana Fallacy or what Elinor Ostrom critiqued as myopic allegories.

We suggest that comparative institutional analysis must be accompanied by comparative failure analysis, by which we mean rigorous and contextual comparative analysis …

Exploring The Interfaces Between Big Data And Intellectual Property Law, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article reviews the application of several IP rights (copyright, patent, sui generis database right, data exclusivity and trade secret) to Big Data. Beyond the protection of software used to collect and process Big Data corpora, copyright’s traditional role is challenged by the relatively unstructured nature of the non-relational (noSQL) databases typical of Big Data corpora. This also impacts the application of the EU sui generis right in databases. Misappropriation (tort-based) or anti-parasitic behaviour protection might apply, where available, to data generated by AI systems that has high but short-lived value. Copyright in material contained in Big Data corpora must …

State Immunity And The Patent Trial And Appeal Board, Tejas N. Narechania

Tejas N. Narechania

Grading Patent Remedies: Dependent Claims And Relative Infringement, Daniel Harris Brean

Daniel Harris Brean

Patent Enforcement In Cyberterritories, Daniel Harris Brean

Daniel Harris Brean