Law Commons^™

The Unresolved Interpretive Ambiguity Of Patent Claims, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Claims are at the heart of every major patent related issue. Most importantly, they determine a patent's potent rights of exclusion. Yet, we cannot predict how courts will set the exact boundaries of claims. This renders smooth operation of the patent system near impossible. For some time, scholars have theorized that a basic policy disagreement is a source of this uncertainty. Some judges favor narrower patents, some favor broader and judges will naturally tend toward their policy preference. Policy disagreements result in claim uncertainty. Recently, scholars Tun- Jen Chiang and Lawrence Solum have taken this view further arguing that this …

The Right Not To Use In Property And Patent Law, Oskar Liivak, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In Continental Paper Bag Co. v. Eastern Paper Bag Co., the Supreme Court held (1) that patent owners have an absolute right not to practice their patent and (2) that even these nonpracticing patent owners are entitled to the liberal use of injunctive relief against infringers. Both of these holdings have been very important to the viability of patent assertion entities, the so-called patent trolls. In eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., the Supreme Court softened the injunction rule. In this Article, we argue that Congress or the Court should reconsider Continental Paper Bag’s embrace of an absolute right …

Finding Invention, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the biggest problems plaguing modern patent law is its inability to provide predictable and clear exclusive rights. We would improve clarity by simply following the patent statute and extending exclusion only to "the patented invention." That suggestion, as reasonable as it may sound, is actually quite radical to the dominant patent law orthodoxy. It is not even clear under the dominant patent law orthodoxy what it would mean to limit patent scope to the invention, but it is generally presumed that it must lead to unacceptably narrow patents. Thus, even if it provides clarity, the invention is thought …

Rescuing The Invention From The Cult Of The Claim, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Patent law is certainly a specialized field but I didn’t think it would be a cult. The term ‘invention’ appears in many critical statutory locations. Yet we have been taught, perhaps brainwashed, to give the term zero substantive import. Substantive use of the invention has been purged from patent doctrine. Instead every substantive question in patent law is answered by reference to the claims, the legal descriptions of the ‘metes and bounds’ of a patent’s exclusionary reach. Despite its promise of precision and uniformity, our modern invention-less system is anything but precise and uniform. This article argues that the trouble …

Rethinking The Concept Of Exclusion In Patent Law, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Patent law’s broad exclusionary rule is one of its defining features. It is unique within intellectual property as it prohibits acts of independent creation. Even if a second inventor had no connection or aid from an initial inventor, patent law allows the first inventor to stop the second. Even though a number of pressing problems can be traced to this rule, it remains untouchable; it is thought to be essential for incentivizing invention. But is it really our only choice? And why is it so different from our otherwise widespread reliance on free entry and competition in markets? The current …

Maintaining Competition In Copying: Narrowing The Scope Of Gene Patents, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In supporting gene patents, the patent office, the courts and other supporters have assumed that gene discoveries are identical to traditional inventions and therefore the patent system should treat them as identical. In other words, they have assumed that the relatively broad claims that are used for traditional inventions are also appropriate for encouraging gene discovery. This article examines this assumption and finds that gene discoveries are critically different from traditional inventions and concludes that the patent system cannot treat them as identical.

As a doctrinal matter, this article applies the generally overlooked constitutional requirements of inventorship and originality and …

The Forgotten Originality Requirement: A Constitutional Hurdle For Gene Patents, Oskar Liivak

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Originality has always been a part of patent law. It bars patents that are obtained by copying from someone or from somewhere. Modern judicial interpretations of the patent act have ignored this second element of originality. But as originality is, at least arguably, a constitutional limit of the Patent and Copyright clause, the courts must interpret the patent act consistently to include originality. As a specific example, the paper focuses on patents claiming isolated and purified naturally-occurring gene sequences. The paper concludes that such patents are not original – they are instead just the result of copying – and thus …

Disease Management And Liability In The Human Genome Era, Larry I. Palmer

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The completion of a rough draft of the Human Genome presents both tremendous potential for improvements in health care delivery and challenges to providing appropriate incentives that will bring forth new treatments while protecting individuals and groups from genetic discrimination. As "genetics" becomes an integral part of health care delivery, there are no existing coherent legal doctrines for balancing the risks and benefits of this technological and scientific achievement. Developing a coherent legal approach to these risks and benefits requires a reexamination of the purposes of the liability doctrines that govern the management of disease processes. At the moment, a …