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Assessing Responses To The Pto’S 2021 Patent Eligibility Study, Jorge L. Contreras, Victoria T. Carrington
Assessing Responses To The Pto’S 2021 Patent Eligibility Study, Jorge L. Contreras, Victoria T. Carrington
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
In July 2021, the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) issued a public request for comments regarding the impact of recent patent eligibility jurisprudence on US businesses and markets. The PTO received 145 responses to its request by the October 2021 deadline. In this paper, we analyze the responses by industry sector and respondent type, assessing whether responses were generally positive, neutral or negative toward US patent eligibility jurisprudence, and also identifying those responses that cited international competitiveness of US businesses (particularly with respect to China) in their reasoning.
Pleasure Patents, Andrew Gilden, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec
Pleasure Patents, Andrew Gilden, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec
Faculty Publications
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents for inventions whose purpose is to facilitate the sexual pleasure of their users. These "pleasure patents" raise a range of novel questions about both patent theory and the relationship between law and sexuality more broadly. Given that "immoral" inventions were long excluded from the patent system, and that sexual devices were widely criminalized for much of the past 150 years, how have patentees successfully framed the contributions of their sexual inventions? If a patentable invention must be both new and useful, how have patentees described the utility of …