Law Commons^™

Muddy Waters: Fair Use Implications Of Google V. Oracle America, Inc., Gary Myers

Faculty Publications

The United States Supreme Court ruling in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. ended a long-running dispute between two giant technology companies. The case, which first began in 2010, has received considerable attention and commentary with regard to the scope of copyright protection for software and then about the contours of the fair use defense. The Court ultimately left the software copyright questions for another day, but it did render an important decision on fair use, the first major precedent on this important topic since 1994.

The Court’s fair use ruling provides important guidance on the scope of fair use …

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 …

Whose Progress?, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress shall have power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” These words have been the subject of countless books and scholarly articles. Professor Silbey’s engaging contribution [in Against Progress: Intellectual Property Law and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age] to the conversation focuses on one word—progress—and what it should mean as we think about intellectual property law’s motivations and justifications in the twenty-first century.

But even …

An Initial Examination Of Computer Programs As Creative Works, Trina C. Kershaw, Ralph D. Clifford, Firas Khatib, Adnan El-Nasan

Faculty Publications

Products from many domains (art, music, engineering design, literature, etc.) are considered to be creative works, but there is a misconception that computer programs are limited by set expressions and thus have no room for creativity. To determine whether computer programs are creative works, we collected programs from 23 advanced graduate students that were written to solve simple and complex bioinformatics problems. These programs were assessed for their variability of expression using a new measurement that we designed. They were also evaluated on several elements of their creativity using a version of Cropley and Kaufman’s (2012) Creative Solution Diagnosis Scale …

Trademark Law And Consumer Constraints, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Trademark law’s focus is on the consumer. Both the trademark literature and the marketing literature, however, tend to assume a consumer with few constraints on economic or cognitive processing resources. For example, scholars have argued that some confusion in the marketplace is not only inevitable but is also an overall positive in that encountering confusion trains consumers to be more resourceful and to learn how to interpret marketing communications more carefully. But not all consumers have the same level of cognitive and economic resources. Disadvantaged consumers—such as those not literate in the English language, those with lower socioeconomic status, and …

Reverse Confusion And The Justification Of Trademark Protection, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Theories of private law are dominated by welfarist normative frameworks, and trademark law is no exception. One such framework—the “search costs” theory associated with the Chicago School of law and economics—has long been the primary accepted justification for trademark rights. However, this theory fails to account for numerous features of actual trademark doctrine, as earlier scholarship has shown. This Article demonstrates how one underexamined area of trademark law—reverse confusion liability— is a similarly poor fit with the predictions and prescriptions of conventional economic theory. Plausible economic theories of trademark rights would either refuse to impose liability in reverse confusion cases …

Resorbing Patent Law's Kessler Cat Into The General Law Of Preclusion, Dennis D. Crouch, Homayoon Rafatijo

Faculty Publications

It has become exceedingly common in our legal system that courts, in the guise of respect for precedent, compound upon errors. Legal precedents are written documents, but "[t]he reality we can put into words is never reality itself." As such, we seldom find a court decision that embodies the entire legal reality regarding the questions presented. In this respect, the legal system inherently suffers from a lack of what mathematicians call completeness. Each decision gives rise to countless inferences because what lower courts observe by reading the precedent is not the entire legal reality but an incomplete reality exposed to …