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Full-Text Articles in Law
Parody As Brand, Stacey Dogan, Mark Lemley
Parody As Brand, Stacey Dogan, Mark Lemley
Faculty Scholarship
Courts have struggled with the evaluation of parody under trademark law. While many trademark courts have protected parodies, there are a surprising number of cases that hold obvious parodies illegal. The problem is particularly severe with respect to parodies that are used to brand products, a growing category. The doctrinal tools that generally protect expressive parodies often don't apply to brand parodies. Our goal in this paper is to think about what circumstances (if any) should lead courts to find parody illegal. We conclude that, despite courts’ increasing attention to speech interests in recent years, the law’s treatment of parody …
Do Npes Matter? Non-Practicing Entities And Patent Litigation Outcomes, Samantha Zyontz, Michael J. Mazzeo, Jonathan H. Ashtor
Do Npes Matter? Non-Practicing Entities And Patent Litigation Outcomes, Samantha Zyontz, Michael J. Mazzeo, Jonathan H. Ashtor
Faculty Scholarship
It is widely argued that so-called “patent trolls” are corrupting the U.S. patent system and endangering technology innovation and commercialization at large. For example, a recent White House report argued that “trolls” hurt firms of all sizes and advocated for specific policies aimed at curtailing practices thought to be particularly harmful. Yet the existence and extent of any systematic effects of so-called “troll-like” behavior, and the implications of modern patent assertion practices by Non-Practicing Entities (“NPEs”), remains unclear. This article develops novel empirical evidence to inform the debate over NPEs on patent litigation. Specifically, we conduct a large-scale empirical analysis …
Notice Failure And Notice Externalities, Michael J. Meurer, Peter Menell
Notice Failure And Notice Externalities, Michael J. Meurer, Peter Menell
Faculty Scholarship
Economic theory suggests that notice plays a critical role in resource development. Resource developers will be disinclined to make significant investments without reasonable confidence that their projects will not violate the rights of others. Land rights systems and institutions generally provide reliable notice at relatively modest cost, enabling exclusionary rights to encourage efficient real estate development. Property boundaries, right structures, and neighbors with whom resource developers might have to negotiate conflicts can usually be ascertained relatively easily. Furthermore, zoning institutions generally provide relatively prompt, low cost, and reliable dispute resolution before developers need to expend substantial resources. Therefore, land claims …
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The US Congress has enacted expansions of copyright which arguably impose high social costs and generate little incentives for authorial creativity. When the two most expansive statutes were challenged as unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court rebuffed the challenges, partly on the supposed ground that copyright law could legitimately seek to promote nonauthorial interests; apparently, Congress could enact provisions aiming to support noncreative disseminative activities such as publishing, or restoring and distributing old film stock, even if authorial incentives were not served. Such an error might have arisen because of three phenomena (in economics, history, and law, respectively) that might easily …
Patent Variation: Discerning Diversity Among Patent Functions, Jessica Silbey
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 …