Law Commons^™

Did The America Invents Act Change University Technology Transfer?, Cynthia L. Dahl

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University technology transfer offices (TTOs) are the gatekeepers to groundbreaking innovations sparked in research laboratories around the U.S. With a business model reliant on patenting and licensing out for commercialization, TTOs were positioned for upheaval when the America Invents Act (AIA) transformed U.S. patent law in 2011. Now almost ten years later, this article examines the AIA’s actual effects on this patent-centric industry. It focuses on the five key areas of most interest to TTOs: i) first to file priority; ii) broadening of the universe of prior art; iii) carve-out to the prior commercial use defense; iv) micro-entity fees; and …

Teaching Would-Be Ip Lawyers To "Speak Engineer": An Interdisciplinary Module To Teach New Intellectual Property Attorneys To Work Across Disciplines, Cynthia Laury Dahl

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More than ever before, law school graduates interested in business law enter a workforce where they must effectively interface with professionals from other disciplines. Yet there are precious few opportunities in law school for students to practice the skills required to perform on an interdisciplinary team. This is especially true regarding mixed teams of law and technical students.

This essay explores a model for integrating an interdisciplinary practicum module into a free-standing class. The module challenges teams of law and engineering students to work together to perform a prior art search, interview an inventor, and draft patent claims over a …

The Impact Of Codification On The Judicial Development Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

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Despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of common law copyright in Wheaton v. Peters and the more specific codification by the Copyright Act of 1976, courts have continued to play an active role in determining the scope of copyright. Four areas of continuing judicial innovation include fair use, misuse, third-party liability, and the first sale doctrine. Some commentators have advocated broad judicial power to revise and overturn statutes. Such sweeping judicial power is hard to reconcile with the democratic commitment to legislative supremacy. At the other extreme are those that view codification as completely displacing courts’ authority to develop legal principles. …

Did Trips Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis Of Patent Duration And Incentives To Innovate, David S. Abrams

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How to structure IP laws in order to maximize social welfare by striking the right balance between incentives to innovate and access to innovation is an empirical question. It is a challenging one to answer, both because innovation is difficult to value and changes in IP protection are rare. The 1995 TRIPS agreement provides a unique opportunity to learn about this question for two reasons. First, the adoption of the agreement was uncertain until shortly before adoption, making it a plausibly exogenous change to patent duration. Second, the nature of the law change meant that the patent duration change was …

The Federal Circuit And Patentability: An Empirical Assessment Of The Law Of Obviousness, Lee Petherbridge, R. Polk Wagner

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It is by now a cliché to suggest that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has weakened the standards for obtaining patents. In this article, we empirically assess that Court’s performance on the ultimate question of patentability— the requirement that a patentable invention must be “nonobvious.” Our findings suggest that the conventional wisdom may not be well-grounded, at least on this measure. Nowhere is the Federal Circuit’s controversial role as the locus of judicial power in the U.S. patent system more evident than in the context of the doctrine of obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103. …

Is The Federal Circuit Succeeding? An Empirical Assessment Of Judicial Performance, Polk Wagner, Lee Petherbridge

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As an appellate body jurisdictionally demarcated by subject matter rather than geography, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit occupies a unique role in the federal judiciary. This controversial institutional design has had profound effects on the jurisprudential development of the legal regimes within its purview - especially the patent law, which the Federal Circuit has come to thoroughly dominate in its two decades of existence. In this Article, we assess the court's performance against its basic premise: that, as compared to prior regional circuit involvement, centralization of legal authority will yield a clearer, more coherent, and …

Of Patents And Path Dependency: A Comment On Burk And Lemley, R. Polk Wagner

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This Article delves into issues surrounding the relationship between technology and the patent law. Responding to Dan Burk and Mark Lemley's earlier article, Is Patent Law Technology-Specific?, the piece notes that the basic question posed by Burk and Lemley's article is a relatively easy question given the several doctrines that explicitly link the subject matter context of an invention to the validity and scope of related patents. This sort of technological exceptionalism (which this Article refers to as micro-exceptionalism) is both observable and easily justifiable for a legal regime directed to technology policy. In contrast, Burk and Lemley's identification of, …