Law Commons^™

Competitive Patent Law, William Hubbard

All Faculty Scholarship

Can U.S. patent law help American businesses compete in global markets? In early 2011, President Barack Obama argued that, to obtain economic prosperity, the United States must "out-innovate . .. the rest of the world,"¹ and that patent reform is a "critical dimension[]" ² of this innovation agenda. Soon thereafter, Congress enacted the most sweeping reforms to U.S. patent law in more than half a century, contending that the changes will "give American inventors and innovators the 21st century patent system they need to compete."³ Surprisingly, no legal scholar has assessed whether patent reform is capable of making …

Patent Variation: Discerning Diversity Among Patent Functions, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article describes and analyzes qualitative interview data collected over a five-year period. The goal of the interviews was to explore the roles of intellectual property (“IP”) in IP rich fields. Interviews were with diverse actors in a wide-range of industries: film, book publishing, visual arts, internet commerce, biology, engineering, chemistry, computer science. The data described and analyzed in this Article focuses on the specific question about the diverse functioning of patents in the subset of interviewees who are scientists and engineers, their lawyers and business partners. The Article proceeds in two parts. Part I describes the empirical dimension of …

A Numerus Clausus Principle For Intellectual Property, Christina Mulligan

Scholarly Works

Real property can only be held and conveyed in a small number of forms, such as fee simple, life estate, and lease. This principle is known as numerus clausus, meaning “the number is closed.” For centuries, the principle has been central to the common-law system of property rights. Scholars have justified it as a mechanism for facilitating effective property alienation, maintaining low transaction costs in the buying and selling of property, and keeping the scope of property owners’ rights clear.

In contrast, the numerus clausus principle is essentially nonexistent in intellectual property law. In the context of patents and copyrights, …

Tattoos & Ip Norms, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

The U.S. tattoo industry generates billions of dollars in annual revenue. Like the music, film, and publishing industries, it derives value from the creation of new, original works of authorship. But unlike rights holders in those more traditional creative industries, tattoo artists rarely assert formal legal rights in disputes over copying or ownership of the works they create. Instead, tattooing is governed by a set of nuanced, overlapping, and occasionally contradictory social norms enforced through informal sanctions. And in contrast to other creative communities that rely on social norms because of the unavailability of formal intellectual property protection, the tattoo …