Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 30 of 47

Full-Text Articles in Law

Fashion's Brand Heritage, Cultural Heritage, And The Piracy Paradox, Felicia Caponigri Jan 2021

Fashion's Brand Heritage, Cultural Heritage, And The Piracy Paradox, Felicia Caponigri

Journal Articles

This Article explores the role that heritage has on our understanding of the appropriateness of intellectual property protection for fashion designs in light of Christopher Sprigman and Kal Raustiala’s seminal work in The Piracy Paradox. At times, heritage seems to both reinforce Sprigman and Raustiala’s argument that fashion thrives in a low-IP regime and, at other times, heritage challenges that argument. Taking Italian fashion design as a case study, this Article considers the intersection of brand heritage, cultural heritage, and intellectual property law and makes three central observations. First, that fashion designs reflecting brand heritage thrive in a low-IP regime. …


Prior Art In The District Court, Stephen Yelderman Jan 2019

Prior Art In The District Court, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This article is an empirical study of the evidence district courts rely upon when invalidating patents. To construct our dataset, we collected every district court ruling, verdict form, and opinion (whether reported or unreported) invalidating a patent claim over a six-and-a-half-year period. We then coded individual invalidation events based on the prior art supporting the court’s analysis. In the end, we observed 3,320 invalidation events based on 817 distinct prior art references.

The nature of the prior art relied upon to invalidate patents informs the value of district court litigation as an error correction tool. The public interest in revoking …


Property And Equity In Trademark Law, Mark Mckenna Jan 2019

Property And Equity In Trademark Law, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This essay, delivered as the Nies Lecture at Marquette Law School, focuses on changes in the doctrinal structure of trademark law over the course of the last century — specifically with respect to the relationship between trademark law’s limits and the broader common law of unfair competition. Changes in that relationship, I will argue, meaningfully increased trademark law's emphasis on property — what the plaintiff owns — and deemphasized legal rules that focused on the defendant’s conduct.


Comparative Analysis Of Innovation Failures And Institutions In Context, Mark Mckenna Jan 2019

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 …


Prior Art In Inter Partes Review, Stephen Yelderman Jan 2019

Prior Art In Inter Partes Review, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Essay is an empirical study of the evidence the Patent Trial and Appeal Board relies upon when cancelling patents in inter partes review. To construct our dataset, we collected every final written decision invalidating a patent claim over a twelve-month period. We coded individual invalidation events on a reference-by-reference, claim-by-claim basis. Drawing on this dataset, we report a number of details about the prior art supporting patent cancellation, including the frequency with which U.S. patents, foreign patents, and printed publications were cited, the frequency with which the invalidating prior art would have been amenable to a pre-filing prior art …


Technical Standards Meet Administrative Law: A Teaching Guide On Incorporation By Reference, Emily S. Bremer Jan 2019

Technical Standards Meet Administrative Law: A Teaching Guide On Incorporation By Reference, Emily S. Bremer

Journal Articles

When an agency incorporates by reference, it promulgates a rule that identifies—but does not reprint—material already published elsewhere. The incorporated materials thus become binding law without actually being printed in the agency's regulations. Sometimes the incorporated materials are privately developed technical standards, which are often copyrighted and available only for a fee. This restriction on access undermines transparency and public participation in the rulemaking process. Finding a solution is challenging because the problem is multidimensional, implicating public policy in the areas of administrative law, federal standards law and policy, and copyright.

This teaching guide is part of module that offers …


Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna Jan 2018

Claiming Design, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Design stands out among intellectual property subject matter in terms of the extent of overlapping protection available. Different forms of intellectual property usually protect different aspects of a product. In the design context, however, precisely the same features are often subject to design patent, trademark, and copyright protection-and parties commonly claim more than one of those forms. Yet, as we show, the claiming regimes of these three forms of design protection differ in significant ways: the timing of claims; claim format (particularly whether the claims are visual or verbal); the multiplicity of claims (whether and how one can make multiple …


Proximate Vs. Geographic Limits On Patent Damages, Stephen Yelderman Jan 2018

Proximate Vs. Geographic Limits On Patent Damages, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

The exclusive rights of a U.S. patent are limited in two important ways. First, a patent has a technical scope—only the products and methods set out in the patent’s claims may constitute infringement. Second, a patent has a geographic scope—making, using, or selling the products or methods described in the patent’s claims will only constitute infringement if that activity takes place in the United States. These boundaries are foundational features of the patent system: there can be no liability for U.S. patent infringement without an act that falls within both the technical and geographic scope of the patent.


Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Appellant And In Support Of Reversal, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet Sep 2017

Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Appellant And In Support Of Reversal, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet

Court Briefs

ASTM’s fundamental complaint is about unauthorized use of its intangible content—the standards for which it claims copyright ownership. Dastar unambiguously holds, however, that only confusion regarding the source of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act; confusion regarding the authorship of the standards or their authorization is not actionable. ASTM cannot avoid Dastar just because Public Resource creates digital copies of those standards. Consumers encounter the ASTM marks only as part of the standards, into which ATSM chose to embed the marks. As a result, any “confusion” could only be the result of the content itself. Dastar teaches that …


Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet, John A. Conway Jun 2017

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet, John A. Conway

Court Briefs

Plaintiff’s false designation of origin and false endorsement claims, such as they are, rest on the assertion that defendants falsely represented themselves as the origin of intellectual property on which the Oculus Rift is based. Those claims are barred by Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), which holds that only confusion regarding the origin of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act.


Criminal Trademark Enforcement And The Problem Of Inevitable Creep, Mark Mckenna Jan 2017

Criminal Trademark Enforcement And The Problem Of Inevitable Creep, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Article, delivered as the 2017 Oldham Lecture at the University of Akron School of Law, focuses on the federal Trademark Counterfeiting Act (TCA), the primary source of federal criminal trademark sanctions. That statute was intended to increase the penalties associated with the most egregious form of trademark infringement — use of an identical mark for goods identical to those for which the mark is registered and in a context in which the use is likely to deceive consumers about the actual source of the counterfeiter’s goods. The TCA was intended to ratchet up the penalties associated with counterfeiting, but …


The Value Of Accuracy In The Patent System, Stephen Yelderman Jan 2017

The Value Of Accuracy In The Patent System, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

Because it must rely on imperfect information, the patent system will inevitably make mistakes. To determine how the system ought to err in cases of uncertainty—and whether a given mistake is worth correcting—scholars have composed a simple picture of the consequences of error in either direction. On the one hand, erroneous patent awards impose unjustified costs. On the other hand, erroneous patent denials discourage successful inventors and reduce incentives to create in the future. The result is an essentially indeterminate balancing, in which policies of overly liberal awards drive up costs, and policies of overly cautious awards drive down incentives. …


What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman Jan 2017

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 …


Introduction: Negotiating Ip's Boundaries In An Evolving World, Stephen Yelderman Jan 2017

Introduction: Negotiating Ip's Boundaries In An Evolving World, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

The common element of the articles that make up this Symposium Issue is a refusal to dismiss difficult questions with mechanical formality, to paper over the wrinkles that emerge when the simple models that function in the middle flounder at the edge. As this Symposium Issue will show, those wrinkles have a lot to tell us.


Coordination-Focused Patent Policy, Stephen Yelderman Oct 2016

Coordination-Focused Patent Policy, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Article explores the practical consequences of an important shift that has recently taken place in patent theory. Although it was long agreed that the purpose of granting patents is to reward invention, today many scholars instead attempt to justify the patent system based on its role in facilitating information exchange and enabling technical coordination among firms. This change in justification is controversial, and its viability remains a fiercely contested question. But despite intense attention at the level of theory, little has been said about the consequences of this debate for patent policy itself. This Article addresses that void, developing …


Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman Oct 2016

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 …


Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet May 2016

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet

Court Briefs

The District Court correctly determined that the challenged speech of Dr. Steven Novella was not commercial speech for purposes of applying the Lanham Act. Appellant’s argument to the contrary conflates “seeking profit” with “commercial speech.”


Brief Amici Curiae Of 37 Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petition For Certiorari, Mark A. Lemley, Mark Mckenna Jan 2016

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 …


Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petitioner, Mark Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Rebecca Tushnett Jan 2016

Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Petitioner, Mark Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Rebecca Tushnett

Court Briefs

In its 1976 revision of the Copyright Act, Congress decided to separate applied art from industrial design, admitting the former to copyright and excluding the latter. It drew this distinction precisely because it intended to differentiate copyright from design and utility patent. Congress recognized as applied art only those aesthetic features of a useful article that could be “separated” from that useful article rather than being integrated into the article.

The correct test of separability therefore considers conceptual separability to be nothing more than a coda to physical separability, and asks only whether the claimed design could be removed from …


Scope, Mark Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley Jan 2016

Scope, Mark Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley

Journal Articles

Virtually every significant legal doctrine in IP is either about whether the plaintiff has a valid IP right that the law will recognize (validity); whether the defendant's conduct violates that right (infringement); or whether the defendant is somehow privileged to violate that right (defenses). IP regimes tend to separate doctrines in these three legal categories relatively strictly. They apply different burdens of proof and persuasion to infringement and validity. In many cases they ask different actors to decide one doctrine but not the other. And even where none of that is true, the nature of IP law is to categorize …


Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellees, Mark Mckenna Nov 2015

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Appellees, Mark Mckenna

Court Briefs

The District Court correctly determined that Phoenix failed to state a trademark claim because Basket Case’s activities cannot have caused any relevant confusion.1 Phoenix’s fundamental complaint is about unauthorized use of its intangible content—karaoke tracks. Under Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), however, only confusion regarding the source of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act; confusion regarding the source of the karaoke tracks or their authorization is not actionable. Phoenix cannot avoid Dastar just because Basket Case creates digital copies of those tracks, as Basket Case does not sell digital files or …


The Hydrox Resurrection, Mark Mckenna Sep 2015

The Hydrox Resurrection, Mark Mckenna

NDLS in the News

KESTENBAUM: I wasn't going to let that stop me. So I called up a trademark expert, Mark McKenna at Notre Dame, and I asked him, is this right? Can someone just waltz in and grab a hundred­year­old trademark, suddenly own this whole history? It seemed a little weird 'cause a trademark is like a kind of property. And if you think of this like land...

SMITH: Like, hey, I notice you haven't mowed your lawn for a while, so I'm just going to take a little part of your property.

KESTENBAUM: Yeah, it seems crazy, right? McKenna said, I'm thinking …


Brief Of Amici Curiae Law Professors In Support Of Defendant-Appellee National Football League, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet Mar 2015

Brief Of Amici Curiae Law Professors In Support Of Defendant-Appellee National Football League, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet

Court Briefs

Based on the undisputed facts, the NFL’s films in this case are noncommercial speech; their profit-seeking and brand-building nature are standard features of noncommercial speech. Truthful, nondefamatory noncommercial speech deserves full First Amendment protection, and there is no justification for allowing Appellants to control speech about them in this case.

Separately, Appellants’ right of publicity claims are preempted by the Copyright Act, which allows owners of copyrighted works to exploit those works by reproduction, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance—precisely the conduct at issue here.

Finally, Appellants’ trademark claims are also precluded by the First Amendment, given that …


Improving Patent Quality With Applicant Incentives, Stephen Yelderman Oct 2014

Improving Patent Quality With Applicant Incentives, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Article offers an alternative approach to the widely recognized problem of low-quality patents being granted by the patent office. Traditional reforms have focused almost exclusively on making the patent office more effective at examination. This Article instead looks at patent quality from an applicant’s perspective, and evaluates how certain patent rules might be encouraging inventors to file higher or lower quality claims. It proposes a variety of reforms to take advantage of applicants’ existing interests in obtaining patents that are both broad enough to create infringing activity and narrow enough to be valid. The result is a distinctive set …


Confusion Isn't Everything, Mark Mckenna, William Mcgeveran Jan 2013

Confusion Isn't Everything, Mark Mckenna, William Mcgeveran

Journal Articles

The typical shorthand justification for trademark rights centers on avoiding consumer confusion. But in truth, this encapsulation mistakes a method for a purpose: confusion merely serves as an indicator of the underlying problems that trademark law seeks to prevent. Other areas of law accept confusion or mistake of all kinds, intervening only when those errors lead to more serious harms. Likewise, every theory of trademark rights considers confusion troubling solely because it threatens more fundamental values such as fair competition or informative communication. In other words, when it comes to the deep purposes of trademark law, confusion isn’t everything. Yet …


Fixing Copyright In Three Impossible Steps: Review Of How To Fix Copyright By William Patry, Mark Mckenna Jan 2013

Fixing Copyright In Three Impossible Steps: Review Of How To Fix Copyright By William Patry, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

This review of William Patry’s How to Fix Copyright highlights three of Patry's themes. First is Patry’s insistence that copyright policy be based on real-world evidence, a suggestion that should be uncontroversial but instead runs headlong into the near-religious commitments of copyright stakeholders. Second is Patry’s emphasis on the difference between the interests of creators, on the one hand, and owners of copyright interests, on the other. Third, and finally, is Patry’s focus on the copyright system’s strong tendency to entrench business models and resist change, particularly in the face of new technology.


Progress And Competition In Design, Mark Mckenna, Katherine J. Strandburg Jan 2013

Progress And Competition In Design, Mark Mckenna, Katherine J. Strandburg

Journal Articles

This Article argues that applying patent-like doctrine to design makes sense only if a design patent system is premised on a patent-like conception of cumulative progress that permits patent examiners and courts to assess whether a novel design reflects a nonobvious step beyond the prior art. If there is a meaningful way to speak of such an inventive step in design, then design patent doctrine should be based on that conception. If nonobviousness has no sensible meaning in design, then a patent system cannot work for design. At present, design patent doctrine is in disarray because it is unmoored from …


Dastar's Next Stand, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

Dastar's Next Stand, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

A series of recent cases implicate the extent to which trademark law can be used to control creative content. The possibility of using trademark law for that purpose obviously creates a potential conflict with copyright law, which ordinarily sets the rules for use of creative material developed by others. Unfortunately, despite its attraction to boundary questions in trademark law, the Supreme Court‘s Dastar decision—its lone decision demarcating trademark and copyright law—remains controversial and its scope somewhat unclear. This Essay argues that Dastar should be understood, or at least should be extended, to rule out any claims based on confusion that …


(Dys)Functionality, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

(Dys)Functionality, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

The functionality doctrine serves a unique role in trademark law: unlike virtually every other doctrine, functionality can trump consumer confusion (or so it seems, at least in mechanical-functionality cases). In this sense, functionality may be the only doctrine in trademark law that can truly be considered a defense. But despite its potential power, the functionality doctrine is quite inconsistently applied. This is true of mechanical functionality cases because courts differ over the extent to which the doctrine focuses on competitors’ right to copy unpatented features as opposed to their need to copy. And aesthetic functionality cases are even more scattered: …


Is Pepsi Really A Substitute For Coke? Market Definition In Antitrust And Ip, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

Is Pepsi Really A Substitute For Coke? Market Definition In Antitrust And Ip, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Antitrust law explicitly depends on market definition. Many issues in IP law also depend on market definition, though that definition is rarely explicit. Applying antitrust traditional market definition to IP goods leads to some startling results. Despite the received wisdom that IP rights don't necessarily confer market power, a wide array of IP rights do exactly that under traditional antitrust principles. This result requires us to rethink both the overly-rigid way we define markets in antitrust law and the competitive consequences of granting IP protection. Both antitrust and IP must begin to think realistically about those consequences, rather than falling …