Law Commons^™

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 …

Securitization Of Patents And Its Continued Viability In Light Of The Current Economic Conditions, Aleksandar Nikolic

Aleksandar Nikolic

No abstract provided.

Four Reasons To Enact A Federal Trade Secrets Act, David S. Almeling

David S. Almeling

Trade secrets stand alone as the only major type of intellectual property governed primarily by state law. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are all governed primarily by federal statutes. Trade secrets, in contrast, are governed by fifty state statutes and common laws. The result is that trade secret law differs from state to state. Almeling argues it is time to eliminate these differences—and the significant problems they cause—by enacting a Federal Trade Secrets Act. In particular, Almeling argues that enacting a FTSA achieves four aims: (1) solving the interstate conflicts caused by having fifty different trade secret laws; (2) making the …

Navigating Cross Border Legal Risks In Intellectual Property Licensing And Technology Transfer To India, Sonia Baldia

Sonia Baldia

No abstract provided.

Looking For Fair Use In The Dmca's Safety Dance, Ira Nathenson

Ira Steven Nathenson

Like a ballet, the notice-and-take-down provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") provide complex procedures to obtain take-downs of online infringement. Copyright owners send notices of infringement to service providers, who in turn remove claimed infringement in exchange for a statutory safe harbor from copyright liability. But like a dance meant for two, the DMCA is less effective in protecting the "third wheel," the users of internet services. Even Senator John McCain - who in 1998 voted for the DMCA - wrote in exasperation to YouTube after some of his presidential campaign videos were removed due to take-downs. McCain …

You Can't Take It With You When You Die... Or Can You?: A Comparative Study Of Post-Mortem Moral Rights Statutes From Israel, France, And The United States, Galia Aharoni

galia aharoni

Moral rights – including the rights to attribution, integrity, and dissemination – is a sticky, controversial subject even standing on its own. Questions concerning the duration of these rights seem to compound the issue even further: If moral rights protection stems from a desire to protect the author’s intrinsic relationship with the work, when should the protection stop? Upon his death? Upon the expiration of the work’s copyright? …Never? Such questions become even more pressing when a country – especially a self-acknowledged “developing” country such as Israel – enacts a moral rights law of its own, and when consequently no …

User Innovator Community Norms At The Boundary Between Academic And Industrial Research, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

In this essay, I consider norms of sharing research tools and materials in what has been called Pasteur’s Quadrant, in which basic science and applied research overlap. I employ a user innovation paradigm, along with a rational choice approach to social norms, to address the issue. The convergence of academic research with commercial interests has two different types of consequences for sharing norms. First, a research tool or material developed in a nonprofit research context may be a dual-purpose innovation with both research and nonresearch uses. Thus, for example, a genetic assay may be useful in research and as a …

The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Katherine J. Strandburg, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann

Katherine J. Strandburg

This paper examines commons as socially constructed environments built via and alongside intellectual property rights systems. We sketch a theoretical framework for examining cultural commons across a broad variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts, and we apply that framework to the university and associated practices and institutions.

Evolving Innovation Paradigms And The Global Intellectual Property Regime, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

Since the negotiation of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) in 1994, the innovative landscape has undergone dramatic changes due to technological advances in fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and digital communications and computation. The increasing potential for user innovation and open and collaborative innovation has brought an explosion of innovative activity that does not fit into the sales-oriented, mass market model which underlies the global intellectual property regime. In this Article, I argue that the debate over global governance of innovation should be expanded to account more fully for the implications of these changes. For the …

Grundläggande Immaterialrätt, Ulrika Wennersten, Ulf Maunsbach

Ulrika Wennersten

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Rights And The Right To Participate In Cultural Life, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Although many contend that human rights law is a justification for intellectual property rights, precisely the opposite is true. Human rights law is far more a limit on intellectual property rights than a rationale for such regimes. In a variety of ways, human rights law requires states to take specific, concrete steps to limit the effects of intellectual property rights in order to protect international human rights. This powerful and emancipatory dimension of human rights law has unfortunately been overshadowed by those who claim human rights as a basis for granting exclusive rights.

The U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and …

Protecting Rights Online, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

Although the human rights and access to knowledge (A2K) movements share many of the same goals, their legal and regulatory agendas have little in common. While state censorship online is a central concern for human rights advocates, this issue has been largely ignored by the A2K movement. Likewise, human rights advocates have failed to examine the cumulative effect of expanding copyright protections on education and culture. These disparate agendas reflect fundamentally different views about what states should regulate and the role of international institutions. Overcoming this divide is critical to ensuring the movements can draw on their respective strengths to …

The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Katherine J. Strandburg, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann

Brett Frischmann

This paper examines commons as socially constructed environments built via and alongside intellectual property rights systems. We sketch a theoretical framework for examining cultural commons across a broad variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts, and we apply that framework to the university and associated practices and institutions.

Internet Killed The Copyright Law: Perfect 10 V. Google And The Devastating Impact On The Exclusiive Right To Display, Deborah B. Morse

Deborah Brightman Morse

Never has the dissonance between copyright and innovation been so extreme. The Internet provides enormous economic growth due to the strength of e-commerce, and affords an avenue for creativity and the wide dissemination of information. Nevertheless, the Internet has become a plague on copyright law. The advent of the digital medium has made the unlawful reproduction, distribution, and display of copyrighted works essentially effortless. The law has been unable to keep pace with the rapid advance of technology. For the past decade, Congress has been actively attempting to draft comprehensible legislation in an effort to afford copyright owners more protection …

Who's In The Club? A Response To Oliar And Sprigman, Katherine J. Strandburg

Katherine J. Strandburg

This brief essay responds to the very interesting article, "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1787 (2008), by Dotan Oliar and Christopher Sprigman.

Patent Citation Networks Revisited: Signs Of A Twenty-First Century Change, Katherine J. Strandburg, Gabor Csardi, Laszlo Zalanyi, Jan Tobochnik, Peter Erdi

Katherine J. Strandburg

This Article reports an empirical study of the network composed of patent “nodes” and citation “links” between them. It builds on an earlier study, in which we argued that trends in the growth of the patent citation network provide evidence that the explosive growth in patenting in the late twentieth century was due at least in part to the issuance of increasingly trivial patents. We defined a measure of patent stratification based on comparative probability of citation; an increase in this measure suggests that the USPTO is issuing patents of comparatively less technological significance. Provocatively, we found that stratification increased …

Facebook 2 Blackberry And Database Trading Systems: Morphing Social Networking To Business Growth In A Global Recession, Roger M. Groves

Roger M. Groves

FACEBOOK 2 BLACKBERRY AND DATABASE TRADING SYSTEMS: MORPHING SOCIAL NETWORKING TO BUSINESS GROWTH IN A GLOBAL RECESSION Summary Facebook has now applications to the Blackberry Smartphone and IPhone. And Facebook has exploded internationally. If the Facebook social networking technology has applications to Blackberry, why not business? And as any business looks for growth, the market is not an existing heavily saturated United States, but a global market. Can the Facebook model of data sharing be customized to propel US technology firms into new international markets? This article claims the affirmative, through a multilateral clearing system, with credits and vouchers, as …

Who Owns Your Body? A Study In Literature And Law, Lori B. Andrews

Lori B. Andrews

No abstract provided.