Law Commons^™

Harnessing And Sharing The Benefits Of State-Sponsored Research: Intellectual Property Rights And Data Sharing In California's Stem Cell Initiative, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Arti K. Rai

Articles

This Article discusses data sharing in California's stem cell initiative against the background of other data sharing efforts and in light of the competing interests that CIRM is directed to balance. We begin by considering how IP law affects data sharing. We then assess the strategic considerations that guide the IP and data policies and strategies of federal, state, and private research sponsors. With this background, we discuss four specific sets of issues that public sponsors of data-rich research, including CIRM, are likely to confront: (1) how to motivate researchers to contribute data; (2) who should have access to the …

Ip's Problem Child: Shifting The Paradigms For Software Protection, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Computer software is somewhat of a problem child for intellectual property law. Courts and legislatures have struggled to encourage innovations in software development while, at the same time, attempting to avoid undesirable digital information monopolies. Neither the patent nor the copyright system has provided a particularly satisfactory paradigm for software protection. Although patents have received greater attention than copyrights in the software context (consider, for example, the recent BlackBerry case), copyright law arguably creates more insidious undercurrents in today's marketplace. This is partly because we have not yet appreciated the potential impact of recent developments in programming methodology and digital …

Reflections On Air Capture: The Political Economy Of Active Intervention In The Global Environment; An Editorial Comment, Edward A. Parson

Articles

When global climate change came onto domestic and international policy agendas in the late 1980s, only two types of response were initially considered: reducing emissions by improving efficiencies or switching to lower or non-carbon energy sources; and adapting to the anticipated changes. Since that time the agenda of potential responses has been progressively expanded, principally by adding various ways to intervene in the global carbon cycle or the climate to break the connection between emissions of greenhouse gases and the resultant climate changes. Three types of these “intervening” responses are now, to varying degrees, present in policy debate: biological sequestration …

Relative Access To Corrective Speech: A New Test For Requiring Actual Malice, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

This Article reexamines the First Amendment protections provided by the public figure doctrine. It suggests that the doctrine is rooted in a set of out-dated assumptions regarding the media landscape and, as a result, has failed to adapt in a manner that accounts for our changing communications environment.

The public figure doctrine, which imposes the more rigorous actual malice standard of fault on defamation plaintiffs who enjoy greater access to mass media, was constructed in an era defined by one-to-many communications media. Newspapers, broadcasters, and traditional publishers exhausted the Court's understanding of the means of communicating with mass audiences. As …