Law Commons^™

The Questionable Use Of Custom In Intellectual Property, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

The treatment of customary practices has been widely debated in many areas of the law, but there has been virtually no discussion of how custom is and should be treated in the context of intellectual property (IP). Nevertheless, customs have a profound impact on both de facto and de jure IP law. The unarticulated incorporation of custom threatens to swallow up IP law, and replace it with industry-led IP regimes that give the public and other creators more limited rights to access and use intellectual property than were envisioned by the Constitution and Congress. This article presents a powerful critique …

Patent Injunctions And The Problem Of Uniformity Cost, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In eBay v. MercExchange, the Supreme Court correctly rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to patent injunctions. However, the Court's opinion does not fully recognize that the problem of uniformity in patent law is more general and that this problem cannot be solved through case-by-case analysis. This Essay provides a field guide for implementing eBay using functional analysis and insights from a uniformity-cost framework developed more fully in prior work. While there can be no general rule governing equitable relief in patent cases, the traditional four factor analysis for injunctive relief should lead the cases to cluster around certain patterns that often …

Harmonization Through Condemnation: Is New London The Key To World Patent Harmony?, Max Oppenheimer

All Faculty Scholarship

Since 1790, when two U.S. patent applicants have claimed the same invention, the patent has been awarded to the first inventor. Today, the United States stands alone in the industrialized world, and many argue that the United States should, in the interest of world patent harmony, change its system so as to award a contested patent to the first applicant. Of the arguments advanced to justify the change, the only ones that withstand scrutiny are that "all the other countries are doing it" and the hope that some concessions in other aspects of intellectual property or trade might be obtained …

Peer To Peer Meets The World Of Legal Information: Encountering A New Paradigm, Ethan Katsh, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles & Chapters

The authors describe a proposed system for patent application reviews that uses new technologies to access information-community peer reviews. By allowing examiners to "mine for data" in the heads of experts rather than in libraries or databases, the proposal illustrates how new technology could change the boundaries of legally authoritative and relevant information and make it possible to identify legitimate authority from new sources.

One Step Outside The Country, One Step Back From Patent Infringement, Katherine E. White

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Accidental Rights, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Written for the Yale Law Journal's online Pocket Part, this is a much shorter and (I hope) more accessible iteration of my earlier paper, Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, 116 Yale L.J. 882 (2007). It summarizes that paper's central point - i.e., that intellectual property entitlements are growing not just because of expansive court decisions and legislative enactments, but also because of seemingly sensible, risk-averse licensing decisions that inadvertently feed back into legal doctrine - and then explores how this phenomenon might apply to (and be manipulated by) enterprises such as Google Book Search.

The Freedom Of Information Act And Trade Secrets, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

This article details a case illustration where federal law intersects with trade secret questions, a subject normally governed by state laws.

Patents On Legal Methods? No Way!, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

An “invention,” as used in the United States patent laws, refers to anything made by man that employs or harnesses a law of nature or a naturally occurring substance for human benefit. A watermill, for instance, harnesses the power of gravity to run machinery. But legal methods, such as tax strategies, are not inventions in this sense, because they employ “laws of man” — not laws of nature to produce a useful result.

The Uneasy Case For Patent Races Over Auctions, Michael B. Abramowicz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In advancing his prospect theory of patents, Edmund Kitch dismissed the possibility of distributing rights to particular inventions through auctions, arguing that the patent system avoids the need for governmental officials to define the boundaries of inventions that have not yet been created. Auctions for patent rights to entire inventive fields, however, might accentuate the benefits of a prospect approach, by allowing for earlier and broader patents. Auction designs that award the patent to the bidder that commits the most money to research and development or that agrees to charge the lowest price, meanwhile, can reduce the costs of the …

The Patent Office Meets The Poison Pill: Why Legal Methods Cannot Be Patented, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

In 2003, for the first time in its 170-year history, the United States Patent Office began awarding patents for novel legal innovations, in addition to traditional inventions such as the telephone or airplane. Commentators have accepted the Patent Office's power to grant legal method patents, but at the same time have criticized this new type of patent on policy grounds. But no one has suggested that the Patent Office exceeded its authority by awarding patents for legal methods, until now.

In the Patent Act of 1952, which is still in effect today, Congress established certain requirements for patentability, including a …

Is Lilly Written Description Paper Tiger?: Comprehensive Assessment Of The Impact Of Eli Lilly And Its Progeny In The Courts And Pto, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

In University of California v. Eli Lilly, decided by the Federal Circuit in 1997, the court established for the first time a new form of patent law's written description requirement, apparently targeted specifically at biotechnology. To this day, the conventional wisdom is that the so-called Lilly written description requirement (LWD) exists as a biotechnology-specific super-enablement requirement, substantially more stringent than the enablement requirement (the conventional standard for patentability), and standing as an impediment to effective patent protection for biotechnology inventions. My objective in writing this article was to test this conventional wisdom, by conducting a comprehensive search for all LWD …

Patent Ships Sail An Antitrust Sea, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

This brief essay arises from my participation in an April 2006 conference at Seattle University Law School, entitled At the Intersection of Antitrust and Intellectual Property Law: Looking Both Ways to Avoid a Collision. This intersection metaphor is a common one for describing antitrust law's relationship with intellectual property law, among both courts and commentators. This essay explores a different metaphor: patent ships sail an antitrust sea, protecting those aboard from competition's harshest dangers - but only for a time. The nautical metaphor evokes three ideas that the crossroads metaphor does not. First, vigorous competition is the pervasive, baseline reality; …

Collateralizing Intellectual Property, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

This Article identifies and critiques the collateralization of intellectual property, revealing the complexity of intersecting secured transaction law, namely Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and doctrinal intellectual property laws such as patent law, copyright law, and trademark law. The inquiry challenges the silence surrounding the pervasive use of intellectual property as collateral in secured financing and suggests changes to the existing framework on secured financing law.

The Article proceeds as follows: Part II discusses the normative intellectual property rights for patents, copyrights, and trademarks and how such rights are utilized as corporate assets. Part III describes different forms …