Law Commons^™

The Research Patent, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The patent system gives courts the discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent protection is sought. The fear is that an early-stage patent on a research input would confer too much control over yet-unknown uses for the chemical, thereby potentially hindering downstream innovation. Yet, denying patents on research inputs can frustrate patent law's broad goal of protecting and promoting scientific and technological advances.

This Article addresses this problem by proposing a new form …

Originality's Other Path, Joseph Fishman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Drawing on original archival research, this Article challenges the standard account of what originality doctrine is and what courts can do with it. It identifies Nelson's forgotten copyright legacy: a still-growing line of cases that treats music differently, sometimes even more analogously to patentable inventions than to other authorial works. These decisions seem to function as a hidden enclave within originality's larger domain, playing by rules that others couldn't get away with. They form originality's other path, much less trod than the familiar one but with a doctrinal story of its own to tell. Originality and nonobviousness's parallel beginnings reveal …