Law Commons^™

The Use Of Mtas To Control Commercialization Of Stem Cell Diagnostics And Therapeutics, Sean O'Connor

Articles

The recent focus on patents as a hindrance to stem cell research may turn out to be a red herring. The real culprits are material transfer agreements (MTAs), which govern the transfer of cell lines and other biological materials. The MTA’s primary purpose in life sciences research is to set contractual rights and obligations between parties where one party transfers biological materials to the other. For example, MTAs often focus on the physical handling, use, and distribution of the materials by the recipient, ensuring that the recipient complies with regulations for research involving humans or animals.

Although these interests are …

Repeat Infringement In The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

Champagne, Feta, And Bourbon: The Spirited Debate About Geographical Indications, Justin Hughes

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Geographical Indications (GIs) are terms for foodstuffs that are associated with certain geographical areas. The law of GIs is currently in a state of flux. Legal protection for GIs mandated in the TRIPS Agreement is implemented through appellations law in France and through certification mark systems in the United States and Canada. This Article first examines the state of GIs throughout the world. The author then turns to the continuing debate between the European Union and other industrialized economies over this unique form of intellectual property. The European Union claims that increasing GI protection would aid developing countries, but, in …

Size Matters (Or Should) In Copyright Law, Justin Hughes

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American copyright law has a widely recognized prohibition against the copyrighting of titles, short phrases, and single words. Despite this bar, effective advocacy has often pushed courts into recognizing independent copyright protection for smaller and smaller pieces of expression, particularly in recent cases involving valuation and taxonomy systems. Copyright case law is rife with dicta suggesting protection of short phrases and single words.

This instability in copyright law is rooted in the fiction that we deny copyright protection to short phrases and single words because they lack originality. In fact, there are many short phrases that cross copyright's low threshold …

Solving The Digital Piracy Puzzle: Disaggregating Fair Use From The Dmca's Anti-Device Provisions, Jacqueline D. Lipton

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Copyright law has always involved balancing creative pursuits against innovations in copying, distribution and, more recently, encryption technologies. A significant problem for copyright law is that many such technologies can be utilized for both socially useful and socially harmful purposes. It is difficult to regulate such technologies in a way that prevents social harms while at the same time facilitating social benefits. The most recent example of this dynamic is evident in the 2005 United States Supreme Court decision in MGM v Grokster - dealing with digital file-sharing technologies. This article draws from the file sharing debate in considering another …

Holding Intellectual Property, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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The collapse of WorldCom, Inc., exposed a complex web of accounting irregularities. Within that web, recent filings by Dick Thornburgh, WorldCom's Bankruptcy Court Examiner, reveal a different type of scheme that involves the holding of intellectual property. Further scrutinizing the scheme reveals that WorldCom and its tax advisors, KPMG Peat Marwick LLP (KPMG), devised a tax avoidance scheme through the creation of an intellectual property holding company (IP holding company). This type of scheme has been widely and quietly utilized in the last twenty years by many corporations with substantial intellectual property.

Indeed, as state taxing authorities have become more …

Intellectual Property Rights And Stem Cell Research: Who Owns The Medical Breakthroughs?, Sean M. O'Connor

Articles

This article will not address the science and ethics of stem cell research—at least as far as those topics are normally addressed in the existing literature. Instead, this article argues that an even more contentious battle is looming on the horizon, with dire practical consequences: Namely, who will own the revolutionary medical breakthroughs that are supposed to emerge from this research? Along the way, this article will assume that stem cell research will progress in some fashion and that at least some of the purported benefits will materialize.

But the central premise is that the pitch of the ownership battle …

The Problem Of New Uses, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Discovering new uses for drugs that are already on the market seems like it ought to be the low-lying fruit of biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D). Firms have already made significant investments in developing these drugs and bringing them to market, including testing them in clinical trials, shepherding them through the FDA regulatory approval process, building production facilities, and training sales staff to market them to physicians. By this point, the drugs have begun to enjoy goodwill among patients and physicians and casual observations in the course of clinical experience may point to potential new uses. One might expect that …

Rewriting Fair Use And The Future Of Copyright Reform, Michael J. Madison

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This Essay describes a social practices approach to the production of creative expression, as a construct to guide reform of copyright law. Specifically, it reimagines copyright's fair use doctrine by basing its statutory text explicitly on social practices. It argues that the social practices approach is consistent with the historical development of the fair use doctrine and with the policy goals of copyright law, and that the approach should be recognized in the text of the statute as well as in judicial applications of fair use.

Beyond Cybersquatting: Taking Domain Name Disputes Past Trademark Policy, Jacqueline D. Lipton

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All good 'cyberlawyers' know that in the late 1990s, legal and regulatory measures were adopted, both at the domestic and international level to address the then-growing problem of 'cybersquatting': that is, the registration of often multiple domain names corresponding to valuable corporate trademarks with the intention of extorting high prices from the trademark owners for transferring the names to them. Since 1999, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ('UDRP') in particular, complemented by the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ('ACPA'), has been very successful in combating this practice. Unfortunately, since the late 1990s, there has been little movement towards developing …

Law As Design: Objects, Concepts, And Digital Things, Michael J. Madison

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This Article initiates an account of things in the law, including both conceptual things and material things. Human relationships matter to the design of law. Yet things matter too. To an increasing extent, and particularly via the advent of digital technology, those relationships are not only considered ex post by the law but are designed into things, ex ante, by their producers. This development has a number of important dimensions. Some are familiar, such as the reification of conceptual things as material things, so that computer software is treated as a good. Others are new, such as the characterization of …

General Public License 3.0: Hacking The Free Software Movement's Constitution, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The General Public License (GPL) enshrines a software hacker’s freedom to use code in important ways. Hackers often refer to the GPL as the free software movement’s “constitution.” Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) wrote the most recent version of the GPL, version 2.0, back in 1991. For a constitution, a fourteen-year-old document is young, but for a license, it is quite old. The revision process is finally underway, led by Stallman and Eben Moglen, FSF’s general counsel.

The release of GPL version 3.0 will be momentous for many reasons, but one reason stands out: The GPL …

Intellectualizing Property: The Tenuous Connections Between Land And Copyright, Stewart E. Sterk

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Increased use of the intellectual property label to describe copyright and related areas of law has spawned analogies to the protections afforded real property. These analogies ignore significant differences between the foundations that undergird real and intellectual property rights. In particular, real property rights operate to avoid breaches of the peace and tragedies of the commons - problems that do not arise with intellectual works - while copyright and other intellectual property rights are designed to provide an incentive to create, an incentive irrelevant when land is at issue. These disparities in justification caution against routine importation of real property …

Taxing The New Intellectual Property Right, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

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Current, albeit arbitrary, rules exist governing the tax treatment of traditional forms of intellectual property, such as patents, trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and trade names. While tax principles exist for these traditional intellectual property and intangible rights, specific tax rules do not exist for new intellectual property rights, such as domain names, that are emerging with the arrival of global electronic commerce transactions on the Internet. This article explores the proper tax treatment of domain name registration and acquisition costs, addressing these parallel questions? Are domain names merely variations of traditional forms of intellectual property and other intangible rights to …

Obvious To Whom? Evaluating Inventions From The Perspective Of Phosita, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

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In this Article, I consider the possibility of giving the USPTO input from currently active technological practitioners in evaluating the obviousness of claimed inventions. Such input could potentially serve three useful functions. First, it could improve the accuracy of USPTO decisionmaking by providing access to the perspective of actual practitioners as to the obviousness of inventions from the perspective of the hypothetical PHOSITA. Second, it could help the USPTO document the evidentiary basis for rejections that rest in part upon tacit knowledge within technological communities. Third, it could provide a quality control mechanism that would improve the credibility of USPTO …

The Narratives Of Cyberspace Law (Or, Learning From Casablanca), Michael J. Madison

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Cyberspace scholars have wrestled extensively with the question of the "right" metaphorical approach to the Internet, in order to guide legal and policy decisions. Literary theorists have wrestled with the perception that cyberspace undermines conventional ideas about narrative. This Essay suggests that each group could learn from the other. Cyberspace tells a better story than literary scholars believe, and the lawyers should pay more attention to the narrative attributes of cyberspace. To illustrate the argument, the Essay proposes a specific story framework for cyberspace: the film Casablanca.

Nationalizing Trademarks: A New International Trademark Jurisprudence?, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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A new international trademark jurisprudence is currently in formation that has negative impact on international trade. Indeed, this new trademark jurisprudence includes the recent phenomenon of states monopolizing the use of generic names through the elevation of such names to trademarks of national stature and the rise of global recognition and registration of geographic indication status for generic names. Professor Nguyen identifies and analyzes the new trademark jurisprudence, and critiques its impact on international trade relations and language propertization. Professor Nguyen proposes a certification mark regime to end the expansion of generic name protection and to promote fair competition.

When We Say UsTm, We Mean It!, A. Michael Froomkin

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No abstract provided.

Where Does Creativity Come From? And Other Stories Of Copyright, Michael J. Madison

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This Commentary on Lydia Pallas Loren, Untangling the Web of Music Copyrights, 53 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 673 (2003), observes that debates over a variety of copyright law issues can be - and in fact, often are - structured in narrative terms, rather than in terms of doctrine, policy, or empirical inquiry. I suggest a series of such narratives, each framed by a theme drawn from a feature film. The Commentary suggests that we should recognize more clearly the role of narrative in intellectual property discourse, and that intellectual property narratives should be examined critically.

Entrepreneurial Open Source Software Hackers: Mysql And Its Dual Licensing, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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Hackers often quibble about commercializing software, yet most willreadily sell their programming services. Richard Stallman, the father of free software, has always recognized that hackers have a right to make money. Aside from selling programming services, however, Stallman's disciples seem to frown upon commercializing software. Other hackers, labeling themselves "open source" developers, have warmed to the possibility that free software may be profitable.

This article describes one of the most promising business models for hackers, called "dual licensing." In this model, hackers offer the same code under two different licenses: a commercial license and an open source license. Licensees who …

A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison

Articles

More than 150 years into development of the doctrine of "fair use" in American copyright law, there is no end to legislative, judicial, and academic efforts to rationalize the doctrine. Its codification in the 1976 Copyright Act appears to have contributed to its fragmentation, rather than to its coherence. This Article suggests that fair use is neither badly conceived nor badly applied, but that it is too often badly understood. As did much of copyright law, fair use originated as a judicially-unacknowledged effort via the law to validate certain favored social practices and patterns. In the main, it has continued …

Bankrupting Trademarks, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

The explosive growth of technology in the last two decades has vastly expanded intellectual property jurisprudence and elevated intellectual property to a heightened status in the marketplace. Indeed, a company's intellectual property assets may now be its most valuable corporate assets. Moreover, the property value of some trademarks is significantly greater than that of the trademark owner's physical assets.

The term “intellectual property” is commonly understood to include patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks. Yet a paradigm has been constructed and enforced over the last fifteen years wherein only patents, trade secrets, and copyrights are included. The paradigm specifically excludes …

Of World Music And Sovereign States, Professors And The Formation Of Legal Norms, Justin Hughes

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No abstract provided.

Fair Use Across Time, Justin Hughes

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This Article proposes that, as a copyright work ages, the scope of fair use, especially as to derivative works and uses, should expand. This is because the "market" for a copyrighted work has a temporal dimension; the copyrighted work has a market of a fixed number of years. In considering the fourth element of § 107 fair use, courts have discussed two kinds of situations in which the market for a plaintiff's work can be adversely affected: (1) situations where a particular defendant's action adversely affected the plaintiffs market, and (2) situations where the defendant's action, if it became "widespread," …

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

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Advances in fundamental biomedical research play an important and growing role in the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic products. Although the development of pharmaceutical end products has long been a proprietary enterprise, biomedical research comes from a very different tradition of open science. Within this tradition, long-standing norms call for relatively unfettered access to fundamental knowledge developed by prior researchers. The tradition of open science has eroded considerably over the past quarter century as proprietary claims have reached farther upstream from end products to cover fundamental discoveries that provide the knowledge base for future product development.

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

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Allowing universities to patent the results of government-sponsored research sometimes works against the public interest.

The Digital Trademark Right: The Troubling New Extraterritorial Reach Of National Law, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act authorizes the development of the digital trademark right. Under this new right, a trademark owner can petition a domestic court to transfer a foreign registrant's domain name to the trademark owner. The trademark owner does not need to travel to the foreign land for the litigation or to petition a foreign court for enforcement of the domestic court's decision. The property transfer order has a global effect, enjoining the foreign registrant from further use of its property in its home country. Is such extraterritorial extension of national law permissible? Does the new digital trademark right …

The Best Patent Practice Or Mere Compromise? A Review Of The Current Draft Of The Substantive Patent Law Treaty And A Proposal For A "First-To-Invent" Exception For Domestic Applicants, Toshiko Takenaka

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Part I of this paper I review the past efforts of patent harmonization. In Part II, I review the current draft of the Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) and compare its major articles with Title 35 of the United States Code, the European Patent Convention (EPC), and Japanese Patent Law (JPL). In Part III, I analyze the changes expected by the integration of the SPLT into U.S. patent practice and examine if such changes would result in the best patent practice. I propose that the best practice takes into account underlying patent policies in such instances in which the changes …

Rights Of Access And The Shape Of The Internet, Michael J. Madison

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This Article reviews recent developments in the law of access to information, that is, cases involving click-through agreements, the doctrine of trespass to chattels, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and civil claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Though the objects of these different doctrines substantially overlap, the different doctrines yield different presumptions regarding the respective rights of information owners and information consumers. The Article reviews those presumptions in light of different metaphorical premises on which courts rely: Internet-as-place, in the trespass, DMCA, and CFAA contexts, and contract-as-assent, in the click-through context. It argues that …

Reconstructing The Software License, Michael J. Madison

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This article analyzes the legitimacy of the software license as a institution of governance for computer programs. The question of the open source license is used as a starting point. Having conducted a broader inquiry into the several possible bases for the legitimacy of software licensing in general, the article argues that none of the grounds on which software licensing in general rests are sound. With respect to open source software in particular, the article concludes that achieving a legitimate institutional form for the goals that open source proponents have set for themselves may require looking beyond licensing as such.