Law Commons^™

Poised On The Precipice: A Critical Examination Of Privacy Litigation, Andrew B. Serwin

Andrew B. Serwin

A collection of factors has caused the United States to be poised on the precipice of a new wave of litigation—litigation arising from the improper use or collection of information. Public concern over privacy is ever increasing while, and some would say because, information has become critical to our everyday existence. In what is now a self-reinforcing cycle, increased public concern has caused an exponential increase in regulations, and the new regulations have caused increased attention and public concern because many of the new laws require public disclosure of security breaches, which increases societal concerns over privacy. Security breach laws, …

Increasing Certainty And Harnessing Private Information In The U.S. Patent System: A Proposal For Reform, Michael Meehan

Michael Meehan PhD

Nearly half of litigated patents are invalidated. Because of this, and in order to reduce the number of “bad patents,” commentators and industry members have called for reforms to increase certainty in the patent system. Many have also proposed reforms that meet the varied needs of different industries. This paper responds to these prior proposals. The paper also suggests reforms to the patent system that are designed to meet the varied needs of different industries, primarily using pharmaceutical and computer industries as examples. The four reforms proposed are: allowing varied amounts of scrutiny in patent examination, pre-litigation claim scope hearings, …

Copyright, Free Expression, And The Enforceability Of “Personal Use-Only” And Other Use-Restrictive Online Tou, Bradley E. Abruzzi

Bradley E Abruzzi

Expression is simultaneously creative and referential. It is copyright’s task both to supply ownership incentives sufficient to promote the creation of expressive works, and to carve out creative (and for that matter, expressive) space from those rights for subsequent creators. Fair use and uses of copyrighted content that the Copyright Act has traditionally privileged are therefore themselves critical to expression. Purveyors of expressive content on the World Wide Web would challenge copyright’s careful balance by conditioning access to content on the user’s acceptance of nonnegotiable, contractually binding terms of use (“TOU”). Website TOU commonly impose “personal use-only” restrictions on users …

Dubai's New Intellectual Property-Based Economy: Prospects For Development Without Dependency, Amir Khoury

Amir Khoury

The Emirate of Dubai has, as a result of deliberate policy actions, been able to reinvigorate, indeed to reinvent, its Intellectual Property Potential. That is to say Dubai has boosted its ability to be the originator (and creator) of intellectual property subject-matter, rather than merely a consumer thereof. Dubai has achieved the two conditions through which an intellectual property régime becomes a valuable national asset for a country with an initially low Intellectual Property Potential; namely a structured regulatory framework coupled with effective infrastructure-related action. Dubai's undertakings in the intellectual property sphere go to show that even a country that …

Will Benefits Of Communicating Face-To-Face Drive Widespread Adoption Of Telepresence For Use In Commercial Negotiation?, Brian D. Mckenzie

Brian D. McKenzie

People are famously egocentric, short-sighted, risk-averse, competitive, and insecure. All of these human characteristics are in play during a face-to-face negotiation, where a negotiator’s ability to control his own characteristics while observing those of his opponent can have a significant impact on the outcome of the negotiation. While highly effective, face-to-face negotiation suffers from the expense of drawing geographically disparate parties into close physical proximity. As a result, alternatives for business have been developed, such as telephone, and email, but this paper will demonstrate how each falls short of the “personal experience” of face-to-face negotiation, and how such a deficiency …

Single Firm Opportunism And The Ftc's Rambus Defeat: Implications For Section 2 Of The Sherman Act, Norman Christopher Hardee

Norman Christopher Hardee

Traditional monopolization principles – focusing on whether conduct is nakedly exclusionary or has an anticompetitive effect – do not provide a good fit for analyzing exclusionary deception in the standard-setting context. Because determining whether there has been an antitrust violation turns, even under the most aggressive enforcement approach, largely on the underlying duties imposed on participants in standard-setting organizations rules, going beyond those clearly defined duties risks an ad hoc, vague definition of antitrust obligations. Individual cases, such as Rambus, provide strong temptations to loosely analyze those duties and to construe them in a way that provides a remedy for …

The Need For Better Analysis Of High Capacity Services, George S. Ford, Lawrence J. Spiwak

GEORGE S FORD

In 1999, the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) began to grant incumbent local exchange carriers (“LECs”) pricing flexibility on special access services in some Metropolitan Statistical Areas (“MSAs”) when specific evidence of competitive alternatives is present. The propriety of that deregulatory move by the FCC has been criticized by the purchasers of such services ever since. Proponents of special access price regulation rely on three central arguments to support a retreat to strict price regulation: (1) the market(s) for special access and similar services is unduly concentrated; (2) rates of return on special access services, computed using FCC ARMIS data, are …

Theft, Transformation, And The Need Of The Immaterial: A Proposal For A Fair Use Digital Sampling Regime, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

Theft, Transformation, and the Need of the Immaterial:

A Proposal for a Fair Use Digital Sampling Regime

ABSTRACT

At its inception, American copyright law had a clear purpose: to incentivize creativity. To this end, the Framers reluctantly granted monopolies to authors. This paper examines the extent to which their original intention has been forgotten, and their granting of monopolies abused, in contemporary practice. It does so through the examination of a specific case: that of sampling—the process of manipulating pre-existing sound recordings and incorporating them in one’s music. While licensing is an expensive and demanding process, imaginative unlicensed borrowing is …

Incentivize Me!—How Incumbent Carriers In The United States Attempt To Extract Greater Deregulation And Incentives In Exchange For Making Next Generation Network Investments, Rob M. Frieden

Rob Frieden

Incumbent carriers often vilify the regulatory process as a drain on efficiency and an unnecessary burden in light of robust marketplace competition. Some claim that regulation creates disincentives for investing in expensive next generation networks (“NGNs”), particularly if regulations mandate unbundling of services into composite parts, with burdensome interconnection and below market pricing of access by competitors. Both incumbents, prospective market entrants and recent market entrants may seek to tilt the competitive playing field to their advantage typically by securing a regulatory sanction that helps them reduce investment costs, delay having to make an investment, or secure a competitive advantage …

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Addressing The Issue Of Websites Which Are "Lost In Space", Patricia A. Broussard

Patricia A Broussard

This article takes a "light-hearted" approach to dealing with vanishing websites that have been used as footnotes in legal scholarship. It pokes a bit of fun at scholarship, but ultimately offers some solutions to the problem of vanishing websites.

Why Have Developers Been Powerless To Develop Ocean Power?, Sarah Mcquillen Tran

Sarah Tran

This Article suggests that regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) offers a robust alternative to regulation by the Mineral Mining Service (MMS) for those alternative energy projects located between three to twelve nautical miles from the U.S. shore. The paper briefly illustrates the ocean’s immense potential to provide this nation with clean, sustainable, and cost-effective energy from ocean waves, tides, and currents. The paper then shows how a heated territorial dispute between FERC and MMS for control over these green energy projects obstructed the research and development necessary to make them viable as the administrative conflict generated immense …

International Harmonization Of Regulation Of Nanomedicine, Gary E. Marchant, Douglas J. Sylvester, Kenneth W. Abbott, Tara Lynn Danforth

Gary E. Marchant

Nanomedicine holds enormous promise for the improved prevention, detection and treatment of disease. Yet, at the same time, countervailing concerns about the potential safety risks of nanotechnologies generally, and nanomedical products specifically, threaten to derail or at least delay the introduction and commercial viability of many nanomedicine applications. All around the globe, national governments are struggling with balancing these competing benefits and risks of nanotechnology in the medical and other sectors. It is becoming increasingly clear that reasonable, effective and predictable regulatory structures will be critical to the successful implementation of nanotechnology. The question examined in this paper is whether …

International Harmonization Of Regulation Of Nanomedicine, Gary E. Marchant, Douglas J. Sylvester, Kenneth W. Abbott, Tara Lynn Danforth

Gary E. Marchant

Nanomedicine holds enormous promise for the improved prevention, detection and treatment of disease. Yet, at the same time, countervailing concerns about the potential safety risks of nanotechnologies generally, and nanomedical products specifically, threaten to derail or at least delay the introduction and commercial viability of many nanomedicine applications. All around the globe, national governments are struggling with balancing these competing benefits and risks of nanotechnology in the medical and other sectors. It is becoming increasingly clear that reasonable, effective and predictable regulatory structures will be critical to the successful implementation of nanotechnology. The question examined in this paper is whether …

Of Mice And Men: Why An Anticommons Has Not Emerged In The Biotechnological Realm, Chester J. Shiu

Chester J Shiu

In 1998 Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg posited that excessive patenting of fundamental biomedical innovations might create a “tragedy of the anticommons.” A decade later, their dire predictions have not come to pass, an outcome which calls much of the legal scholarship on the topic into question. This Article proposes that legal commentators’ theoretical arguments have largely ignored two very important factors. First, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the single most important actor in the biomedical research industry—has played an active role in keeping the biomedical research domain open. In particular, regardless of what the current patent regime may theoretically …

Zippo-Ing The Wrong Way: How The Internet Has Misdirected The Federal Courts In Their Personal Jurisdiction Analysis, Catherine Ross Dunham

Catherine Ross Dunham

ZIPPO-ING THE WRONG WAY: HOW THE INTERNET HAS MISDIRECTED THE FEDERAL COURTS IN THEIR PERSONAL JURISDICTION ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT

In 1997, the Federal District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania evaluated one in a line of emerging personal jurisdiction cases that raised the question of whether Internet-based contacts with citizens of the forum state can alone establish the defendant purposefully established contacts with the forum state. In this unlikely watershed case, Zippo Mfg. Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, the District Court wrangled with the new concept of purposeful availment through electronic contact with the forum state. The court viewed Zippo …

Website Proprietorship And Cyber Harassment, Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim

While harassment and bullying have always existed, when such behavior is conducted online, the consequences can be uniquely devastating. The anonymity of harassers, the ease of widespread digital dissemination, and the inability to contain and/or eliminate online information aggravate the nature of harassment on the Internet. Furthermore, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides website sponsors with immunity for content posted by others and no incentive to remove offending content. Given the unique nature of cyber harassment, ex post punitive measures are inadequate to redress grievances. In this Article, I propose the imposition of proprietorship liability upon website sponsors …

The American Models Of Technology Transfer: Contextualized Emulation By Developing Countries?, Benton C. Martin

Benton C. Martin

Patents are an essential part of the US economy, sparked by ground-breaking legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act and the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act, which allowed ownership of technology resulting from research funded by the federal government, though it is far from clear whether this same type of legislation would benefit developing countries. Yet because of the legislation’s success in the United States, developing countries are increasingly adopting the same approach. Thus, studying how this legislation might be adopted by developing countries is an important topic. This article emphasized that that these two particular pieces of legislation have been tailored to specific …

Daubert V. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals And The Local Construction Of Reliability, Robert R. Robinson

Robert R Robinson

Scholars considering how expert testimony will fare under Daubert often apply the four dicta referenced by Justice Blackmun (testing, peer-review, error rate, and general acceptance) to determine whether such testimony will be admissible. In this article I critique this approach, contending that admissibility decisions cannot be adequately predicted by Daubert itself. Daubert has no clear legal rule for judges to apply, has no cognizable position on the degree of scrutiny expert testimony should face, and has no clear stance—even given the dicta—on what constitutes “good science.” When combined with the relative autonomy trial judges possess in making admissibility decisions, Daubert’s …