Law Commons^™

Patent Law And The Emigration Of Innovation, Greg Day, Steven Udick

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Legislators and industry leaders claim that patent strength in the United States has declined, causing firms to innovate in foreign countries. However, scholarship has largely dismissed the theory that foreign patents have any effect on where firms invent, considering that patent law is bound by strict territorial limitations (as a result, one cannot strengthen their patent protection by innovating abroad). In essence, then, industry leaders are deeply divided from scholarship about whether innovative firms seek out jurisdictions offering stronger patent rights, affecting the rate of innovation.

To resolve this puzzle, we offer a novel theory of patent rights — which …

All For Copyright Stand Up And Holler! Three Cheers For Star Athletica And The U.S. Supreme Court’S Perceived And Imagined Separately Test, David E. Shipley

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In March 2017 the United States Supreme Court held in Star Athletica L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands Inc. that an artistic feature incorporated into the design of a useful article could be protected by copyright when that feature could be perceived as a two- or three-dimensional work of art separate from the useful article, and imagined separately as a protectable pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This two-part test replaces a variety of tests which courts and commentators proposed and applied during the last 40 years. The Star Athletica decision is predicted to be a boon to the fashion and apparel industry, …

Reasonable Certainty & Corpus Linguistics: Judging Definiteness After Nautilus & Teva, Joseph S. Miller

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In Nautilus (2014), the Supreme Court held “that a patent is invalid for indefiniteness if its claims...fail to inform, with reasonable certainty, those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention.” We don’t require perfect clarity because, as Festo (2002) highlights, patentees can’t achieve it. We don’t launch a post hoc judicial salvage operation to rescue slipshod text because, as the functional-claiming cases from the 1930s and 1940s highlight, others can’t adequately plan around it. Reasonably certain notice, then, is just right: § 112 “require[s] that a patent’s claims, viewed in light of the specification and prosecution history, …

Genomics Unbound: The Scientific And Legal Case Against Patents Based On Naturally Occurring Dna Sequences, Fazal Khan

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While there have been mixed opinions as to whether gene patents were dead in light of Prometheus,this Article argues that a proper understanding of patent law, genomics, and public policy concerns should lead to no other result. The primary focus of this piece is to rebut certain vested interests in the biotechnology industry and affirm the normative claim that gene patents improperly fetter genomics research and development. First, through the lens of the Myriad case, we will recount why there was such a strong public interest movement against recognizing such patents. Specifically, we will show how patents on naturally occurring …

A Numerus Clausus Principle For Intellectual Property, Christina Mulligan

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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, …

Bilski V. Kappos: Everything Old Is New Again, Joe Miller

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My goal in this brief Essay is to introduce the symposium papers by describing the basics of the Bilski case. I also offer a brief thought about where interested observers might turn next in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's § 101 jurisprudence for insights about how that court may implement Bilski's unmistakable revival of Benson and Fook. Specifically, now that the 15-year Alappat/State Street misadventure, with its patent-maximizing "useful, concrete, and tangible result" standard, has come to an end, it is time to revisit the reasoning and results in a rich trove of cases from the …

Transaction Costs And Patent Reform, Paul J. Heald

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This article considers current proposals for patent law reform in light of a simple theory about intellectual property law: In a world without transactions costs, the assignment of property rights is not necessary to stimulate the optimal production of creative goods. Because potential users of inventions could contract for their creation, a compelling justification for granting property rights in these intangibles is the reduction of real-world transaction and information costs that hinder, or make impossible, contract formation between users and creators. Proposals for patent law reform, therefore, should be evaluated by whether a change in legal rights, or in the …

Standard Setting, Patents, And Access Lock-In: Rand Licensing And The Theory Of The Firm, Joseph S. Miller

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Many leading voluntary standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have adopted intellectual property (IP) policies under which participants must promise to license any patents on technology that they contribute to a standard, and to do so on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms (RAND). The standard setting literature includes a substantial focus on the widespread use of this RAND promise. A common refrain in these analyses of the RAND promise is that its meaning is dysfunctionally uncertain. We know more about the RAND promise, however, than the existing literature suggests. I show that we already know the RAND promise's core meaning, and why it remains …

The Antitrust Legality Of Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation Settlements, James F. Ponsoldt, W. Hennen Ehrenclou

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Several federal courts of appeal have recently ruled on the issue of whether a pharmaceutical patent infringement settlement, pursuant to which a generic drug manufacturer agrees to forgo marketing a particular drug in return for monetary payments from a patent-holding “pioneer” drug manufacturer, is a violation of antitrust law. These payments are termed “reverse payments” because, contrary to normal settlements, the plaintiff makes a lump sum payment to the defendant. Reverse payments have sparked considerable academic comment and controversy. Even more recently, the Federal Trade Commission (“Commission”) and the Solicitor General have expressed views on the issue, in the context …

Misreading A Canonical Work: An Analysis Of Mansfield's 1994 Study, Paul J. Heald

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It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Edwin Mansfield's 1994 empirical study for the International Finance Corporation (an arm of the World Bank) of American business executives' attitudes toward low levels of intellectual property protection in developing nations. His paper is ubiquitously cited for the proposition that if developing countries raise their level of intellectual property protection (especially patents), they will attract foreign investment and technology transfer. In the spirit of the honoree of this symposium, I take a skeptical new look at a canonical work and conclude that the developing world should be very suspicious of the …

"Available State Remedies" And The Fourteenth Amendment: Comments On Florida Prepaid V. College Savings Bank, Michael L. Wells

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In Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank, decided during the Supreme Court's October 1998 Term, the specific point at issue was the scope of Congress's authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to impose liability for damages on state governments. In the Patent Remedy Act, Congress had abrogated the states' sovereign immunity from claims of patent infringement. College Savings Bank argued for the validity of the statute on the grounds that patents are property; that patent infringements are deprivations of property; and that the statute simply and appropriately provides a remedy for deprivations of …