Law Commons^™

Dystopian Trademark Revelations

Connecticut Law Review

Uncovering dystopian technologies is challenging. Nondisclosure agreements, procurement policies, trade secrets, and strategic obfuscation collude to shield the development and deployment of these technologies from public scrutiny until it is too late to combat them with law or policy. But occasionally, exposing dystopian technologies is simple. Corporations choose technology trademarks inspired by dystopian philosophies and novels or similar elements of real life—all warnings that their potential uses are dystopian as well. That pronouncement is not necessarily trumpeted on social media or corporate websites, however. It is revealed in a more surprising place: trademark registrations at the U.S. Patent and Trademark …

Patent Office Power And Discretionary Denials

Connecticut Law Review

One of the most divisive and debated issues in patent law in recent years has been the Patent Office’s practice of denying petitions for inter partes review (IPR)—the Patent Office proceeding to review and cancel wrongfully issued patents—on discretionary procedural grounds, such as duplicative Patent Office proceedings or the existence of advanced parallel litigation. On the surface, the discretionary denial practice seems like an odd candidate to provoke such fierce opposition. Discretionary denials have affected a small percentage of IPR petitions without making any changes to the features that have made IPRs so effective at invalidating “bad” patents. As a …

How Patents Became Politics, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

Political mobilization in the digital age often coalesces around opposition to the far-reaching protection of intellectual property. Both copyright and patent have materialized as the centerpiece of major political and legal debates that take a variety of forms, including the European pirate parties, NGOs such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States, and the call for Open Source software. The commonplace narrative is that self-interested stakeholders over the past century successfully fashioned an ever-expanding intellectual property system, and that resistance to such legal control of knowledge only emerged in our times. By contrast, this article recovers a little-known …

Under A Nifty Light: Trademark Considerations For The New Digital World, Willajeane Mclean

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Compulsory Licensing Of Patents During Pandemics, Sapna Kumar

Connecticut Law Review

Wealthy countries with major pharmaceutical industries have historically supported strong patent rights and opposed temporarily abrogating them—even to save lives. However, as drug shortages have become commonplace due to COVID-19, governments have begun reassessing their views. The European Union and various countries have issued new policies and passed legislation facilitating their ability to provide drugs to their citizens for the duration of the pandemic. They have signaled a willingness to do so through “compulsory licensing,” in which the government issues a license to a third party to produce a patented invention without the patent holder’s permission and pays the patent …

To Be Continued: How Comic Book Copyright Inequity Inspired Industry Innovation And Instilled Instrumentalities For Independence, Richard P. Metzroth

Connecticut Law Review

Before Superman first made the world believe a man can fly or Captain America greeted Hitler with a punch to the face, comic book publishers sought to exercise command over all the characters and stories that writers and artists put to paper. Until recently, this one-sided industry culture regarding ownership—reinforced by decades of court rulings in publishers’ favor—left creators with few avenues by which to retain control of their art. The legal norms that enforced creators’ subservient position in the comic book copyright ecosystem drove these authors to seek out and construct alternative systemsfrom which they could realize the benefits …

A Case For Compulsory Licensing In Instances Of Reverse Trademark Confusion, Lauren Straight

Connecticut Law Review

Trademark remedies in cases of reverse confusion are economically inefficient. Junior users in the best position to take economic advantage of marks are sometimes unable to do so due to prior use of a mark by a much smaller, remote senior user. This creates economic inefficiencies and leaves market share unutilized. For this reason, TRIPS needs to be revised to allow for a limited system of compulsory licensing for trademarks in reverse confusion cases. A system of compulsory licensing for trademarks would allow the person or company in the best position to use and gain market share from a trademark, …

Is China Stealing Our Tech? A Look Into The Role Of Intellectual Property Rights In Us-China Trade Relations, Ryan Chester

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis aims to further the current scholarship on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and their effects on international trade and the US-China trade relationship more specifically. The main analysis of this thesis is a quantitative cross-country analysis of over 100 countries to see how IPR plays a role in international trade, while analyzing how the Sino-US trade relationship fits into larger trends. This thesis aims to answer the questions as follows: What are the current policies surrounding Intellectual Property Rights between China and the US? Does increasing the strength of IPR laws influence imports? Does the strength of a country’s …

Muzzling Antitrust: Information Products, Innovation And Free Speech, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

How well does the American legal system balance the diverse values society espouses? Courts must often navigate values that are not consistent, commensurate, or subject to ordinal ranking. This article examines the confluence of incommensurate values within the important context of antitrust challenges to information product redesigns (e.g., Google, Nielsen). The information economy has given rise to the emergence of powerful firms in the business of information products. Some of these firms have had product redesigns challenged as anticompetitive. This article examines two defenses to these challenges. First, the products constitute protected speech and should be immunized entirely from antitrust …

Rebalancing Trips, Molly Land

Faculty Articles and Papers

Application of the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution procedures to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) has provoked a variety of reactions over time. Initially perceived as a significant loss for developing countries, more recent responses maintain that these fears were unfounded. This Article argues that the availability of adjudication through the WTO has indeed had significant consequences for the policy space of developing countries — just not in the manner initially imagined. One of the most important yet underappreciated consequences of the decision to link trade and intellectual property has been the conflation of trade and …

The Once And Future Networked Self, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Social Movements In Late Nineteenth-Century America, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests as a mechanism to establish claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’ ever-expanding proprietary control of knowledge and establishing a more public regarding copyright system. This Article examines one of the most notable intellectual property political movements, the emergence of late nineteenth-century agitation to provide copyright protection for foreign authors as a social movement. It places this political and legal activism within the larger framework of Progressive Era reform. During this …

Non-Per Se Treatment Of Buyer Price-Fixing In Intellectual Property Settings, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

The ability of intellectual property owners to earn monopoly rents and the inability of horizontal competitors to price fix legally are two propositions that are often taken as givens. This article challenges the wholesale adoption of either proposition within the context of buyer price-fixing in intellectual property markets. More specifically, it examines antitrust law’s role in protecting patent holders’ rents through its condemnation of otherwise ostensibly efficient buyer price fixing. Using basic economic analysis, this article refines the legal standards applicable at this point of intersection between antitrust and patent law. In particular, the author recommends the limited abandonment of …

The Evolution Of Copyright Law In The Arts, Kevin Liftig

Honors Scholar Theses

As digital storage of intellectual goods such as literature and music has become widespread, the duplication and unlicensed distribution of these goods has become a frequent source of legal contention. When technology for production and replication of intellectual goods advanced, there were disputes concerning the rights to produce and duplicate these works. As new technologies have made copies of intellectual goods more accessible, legal institutions have largely moved to protect the rights of ownership of ideas through copyright laws. This paper will examine key changes in the technology that affect intellectual property, and the responses that legal institutions have made …

Determining Orphan Works Vs. Public Domain Status For Print Works Published In The U.S. From 1923 Through 1977, Inclusive, David Lowe

Published Works

Document is a proposed draft of a decision tree to be used in mass digitization workflows to facilitate determining whether or not a published item (U.S. imprints only, 1923-1977) may be digitized and then given open access.

The Making Of The Post-War Paradigm In American Intellectual Property Law, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

During the New Deal period, intellectual property underwent a transformation. Copyright was recast from literary property to industrial property; trademark shifted from a common law tort of palming off to a regulatory regime for a mass consumer economy, and patent law was rethought to accommodate corporate invention. This essay begins by examining the advantages of looking at intellectual property as deeply situated in New Deal debates over political economy, and calls for a new history of intellectual property very different from conventional narratives moored in the introduction of new technologies. More broadly, it suggests that examining foundational past policy debates, …

Policy Implications Of Weak Patent Rights, Hillary Greene, James J. Anton, Dennis A. Yao

Faculty Articles and Papers

Patents vary substantially in the degree of protection provided against unauthorized imitation. In this chapter we explore a range of work addressing the economic and policy implications of "weak" patents--patents that have a significant probability of being overturned or being circumvented relatively easily---on innovation and disclosure incentives, antitrust policy, and organizational incentives and entrepreneurial activity.

Weak patents cause firms to rely more heavily on secrecy. Thus, the competitive environment is characterized by private information about the extent of the innovator's know-how. In such an environment weak patents increase the likelihood of imitation and infringement, reduce the amount of knowledge publicly …

Competition Perspectives On Patent Law Substance And Procedure: An Overview Of The Ftc/Doj Hearings And The Ftc Report, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Trade Secrets, Property, And Social Relations, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Towards An Integrated Theory Of Intellectual Property, Peter Siegelman, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Articles and Papers

In recent years, the importance of intellectual property law both as an academic discipline and as a real world phenomenon has risen meteorically. Oddly, however, there exists a striking misfit between the academic theory of intellectual property and its use in the real world. Economists and legal scholars tend to treat each of the constituent fields of intellectual property as discrete and insular. Worse yet, the same insularity has pervaded the United States Supreme Court's intellectual property jurisprudence. Most recently, in TrafFix Devices v. Marketing Displays, Justice Kennedy opined that "[trademark law] does not exist to reward manufacturers for their …

Afterword: The Role Of The Competition Community In The Patent Law Discourse, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

The Federal Circuit is the most visible point of the intersection between competition and patent law. When a single case contains both competition and patent issues, precedents of that court, including those pertaining to governing legal burdens or presumptions, will be critical. It is worth considering whether and how actual or assumed consumer welfare trade-offs are reflected in those decisions. Additionally, the basic decision to confer patents, and the attendant choices regarding their breadth, scope, and other aspects, also reflect social value judgments that directly implicate competition. The competition community can help both to focus attention upon and to illuminate …

What Is Property's Fourth Estate - Cultural Property And The Fiduciary Ideal, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Who Authors Trademarks, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Who's Afraid Of Functional Claims - Reforming The Patent Law's 112, 6 Jurisprudence, Mark Weston Janis

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Public Performance Right In Recordings: How To Alter The Copyright System Without Improving It, Lewis Kurlantzick

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of State Law Protection Of Sound Recordings, Lewis Kurlantzick

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.