Law Commons^™

Rule-Making Petition Concerning Eligibility, Under 37 C.F.R. § 11.7 To Sit For The Examination For Registration To Practice In Patent Cases Before The United States Patent And Trademark Office, Thomas G. Field Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Petition under 5 U.S.C. § 553(e) is filed on behalf of Petitioner and other parties with legally-cognizable interest (hereafter “Signatories”) in the specification of credentials under guidelines promulgated by the PTO Office of Enrollment and Discipline (“OED”) and amended from time without public notice or opportunity to comment. Signatories include individuals likely to be unfairly refused permission to sit, individuals whose status is uncertain, and professors with an interest in whether their students may or may not be permitted to sit. Signatories hereby request that the PTO, in accordance with 35 U.S.C. § 2(b)(2)(D), amplify the qualifications sufficient to …

Keeping Up With Copyright, Margaret Ann Wilkinson

Law Presentations

No abstract provided.

Interface Between Ip And Competition Law In Taiwan, Kung-Chung Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The modernization of Taiwan’s intellectual property (IP) laws has been most marked in the last 10 to 15 years.] During that period, Taiwan also responded to U.S. Section 301 pressure by enacting and enforcing the Fair Trade Act of 1991, a general competition law. The issue of the interface between IP and antitrust law has gradually gained sigdcance in the last couple of years. To some extent, as its development in Taiwan testifies, competition law has circumscribed the scope of IP laws and inacted a spd-over effect on the IP laws. The ramification of competition law in Taiwan with regard …

Intellectual Property: The Practical And Legal Fundamentals, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

Patents, copyrights, trademarks and related interests are known as intellectual property (IP). It has not been long since patents especially were regarded in U.S. courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, as tools of monopolists, and their owners often fared poorly. However, people have come increasingly to view privately funded innovation as critical to national economic well-being and to agree that such innovation cannot occur unless companies that succeed in the marketplace can recoup their research, development and marketing costs. That is a major function of IP, and, particularly within the past dozen years, IP has been seen, both here …

The Penumbral Public Domain: Constitutional Limits On Quasi-Copyright Legislation, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

This Article attempts to reconcile the breadth of the modern Commerce Clause with the notion of meaningful and enforceable limits on Congress' copyright authority under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

The Article aims to achieve two objectives. First, it seeks to outline a general approach to identifying and resolving inter-clause conflicts, sketching a methodology that has been lacking in the courts' sparse treatment of such conflicts. Second, it applies that general framework to the copyright power in order to outline the scope of constitutional prohibitions against quasi-copyright protections. In particular, this application focuses on the federal anti-bootlegging statutes and …

The Magnificence Of The Disaster: Reconstructing The Sony Bmg Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.

The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security …

Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright, Originality, And The End Of The Scenes A Faire And Merger Doctrines For Visual Works, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The merger doctrine in copyright states that if an idea and the expression of the idea are so tied together that the idea and its expression are one - there is only one conceivable way or a drastically limited number of ways to express and embody the idea in a work - then the expression of the idea is uncopyrightable because ideas may not be copyrighted. The scenes a faire doctrine complements the merger doctrine by providing that certain subject matter - stock images, tried and true story lines, fables and folklore, scenes of nature, common visual and cultural references, …

Digital Rights Management And The Process Of Fair Use, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Producers of digital media works increasingly employ technological protection measures, commonly referred to as "digital rights management" (or "DRM") technologies, that prevent the works from being accessed or used except upon conditions the producers themselves specify. These technologies have come under criticism for interfering with the rights users enjoy under copyright law, including the right to engage in fair uses of the DRM-protected works. Most DRM mechanisms are not engineered to include exceptions for fair use, and user circumvention of the DRM may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act even if the use for which the circumvention occurs is itself …

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Abstraction: The Law And Economics Of Copyright Scope And Doctrinal Efficiency, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Uncertainty as to the optimum extent of protection generally limits the capacity of law and economics to translate economic theory into coherent doctrinal recommendations in the realm of copyright. This Article explores the relationship between copyright scope, doctrinal efficiency, and welfare from a theoretical perspective to develop a framework for evaluating specific doctrinal recommendations in copyright law.

The usefulness of applying this framework in either rejecting or improving doctrinal recommendations is illustrated with reference to the predominant law and economics theories of fair use. The metric-driven analysis adopted in this Article demonstrates the general robustness of the market-failure approach to …

War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica D. Litman

Other Publications

I'd like to thank the Copyright Society and the Brace committee for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I am honored that you invited me to give this lecture. I want to talk a little bit about war - copyright war - and then I want to talk a little bit about peace. It's become conventional that we're in the middle of a copyright war.' I tried to track down who started calling it that, and what I can tell you is that about ten years ago, about the time that copyright lawyers everywhere were arguing about the …

Compulsory Licenses In Peer-To-Peer File Sharing: A Workable Solution?, Michael Botein, Edward Samuels

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legal Protocols And Practices For Managing Copyright In Electronic Theses, Mark Perry, Paula Callan

Law Publications

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia, PhD and Masters by Research candidates are required to deposit both print and digital copies of their theses and dissertations. The fulltext of these digital theses is then made freely available online via the Australian Digital Thesis (ADT) collection. Management of copyright issues has been a major headache and workload problem for the Library: there are many parties involved in the deposit process, and the lack of a common understanding about the rights and responsibilities of the various stakeholders has made the process very complex and time consuming. The response of …

The Public Interest In Moral Rights Protection, Margaret Ann Wilkinson

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Academic Discourse And Proprietary Rights: Putting Patents In Their Proper Place, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Article provides a fresh perspective on the Bayh-Dole debate by focusing on the impact of patent novelty rules on academic discourse. The Article proposes that to begin to reverse an observed deterioration in disclosure norms, flexibilities must be built into the patent system so that patents can be facilitators of the academic knowledge dissemination enterprise. In particular, the Article advocates creation of an opt-in extended grace period that would provide more time for academic researchers to publish and present early-stage research before having to file a patent application. Such an extension, coupled with early application publication, would both address …

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 …

The Saga Of A Song: Authorship And Ownership In The Case Of ‘Guantanamera’, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why We Are Confused About The Trademark Dilution Law, Christine Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In the decade following passage of a federal right of anti-dilution, the biggest question in trademark law was how to prove dilution. This is a clear sign of something. Can no smart attorney, judge, or social scientist figure out what dilution is in order to prove it? Dilution has proven to be a "dauntingly elusive concept" for the courts. Even in the Supreme Court, nearly all of the questions from the Justices In oral argument in Moseley v. V. Secret Catalog were seeking to simply understand what dilution is.Unless they simply know it when they see it, other courts either …

Trademark Dilution Law: What's Behind The Rhetoric?, Christine Haight Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Resources In And For Space: The Practitioner's Experience, Gary Myers

Faculty Publications

Today, our inquiry is timely because, increasingly, intellectual property law is becoming more important in space activities. The increasing sophistication of international cooperation and the growth of commercial and private space activities have brought intellectual property issues to greater prominence.

The Privacy Gambit: Toward A Game Theoretic Approach To International Data Protection, Horace E. Anderson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article briefly explores several scenarios in which economic actors compete and cooperate in order to capture the value in personal information. The focus then shifts to one particular scenario: the ongoing interaction between the United States and the European Union in attempting to construct data protection regimes that serve the philosophies and citizens of each jurisdiction as well as provide a strategic economic advantage. A game theoretic model is presented to explain the course of dealings between the two actors, including both unilateral and bilateral actions. Part I ends with an exploration of opportunities for seizing competitive advantage, and …

The Recasting Of Copyright & Related Rights For The Knowledge Economy, P Bernt Hugenholtz, Mireille Van Eechoud, Stef J. Van Gompel, Natali Helberger, Lucie Guibault

Reports & Public Policy Documents

In the European Union, copyright law is increasingly a matter for the European legislator. Member states retain ever less competence to regulate intellectual property rights.

This study critically examines the 'acquis communautaire' in the field of copyright and related (neighbouring) rights, focusing on the seven copyright specific directives, from the 1991 Software directive to the 2001 Information Society Directive. It also deals with distinct issues that are on the agenda of the EU: After reviewing arguments for and against the extension of the term of protection of phonograms (sound recordings), the authors conclude there is no convincing case for extending …

Preserving The Patent Process To Incentivize Innovation In A Global Economy, Katherine E. White

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

A Technological Theory Of The Arms Race, Lee B. Kovarsky

Faculty Scholarship

Although the 'technological arms race' has recently emerged as a vogue-ish piece of legal terminology, scholarship has quite conspicuously failed to explore the phenomenon systematically. What are 'technological' arms races? Why do they happen? Does the recent spike in scholarly attention actually reflect their novelty? Are they always inefficient? How do they differ from military ones? What role can legal institutions play in slowing them down? In this Article I seek to answer these questions. I argue that copyright enforcement and self-help represent substitutable tactics for regulating access to expressive assets, and that the efficacy of each tactic depends on …

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …

Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

The fair use defense in copyright law shields an intellectual commons of protected uses of copyrighted material from infringement actions. In determining whether a given use is fair, courts must assess the new use's potential effect on the market for the copyrighted work. Fair use jurisprudence too often fails to address the complementary, network, and long-range effects of new technologies on the market for copyrighted works. These effects parallel the indirect, direct, and option values of biodiversity recently recognized by environmental economists. Their sophisticated methods for valuing natural resources in tangible commons can inform legal efforts to address the intellectual …

Intellectual Property: Trade Secrets And The Federal Tort Claims Act/Dd Form 882 Over Substance: Caveat Forfeiture, Katherine E. White

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

A New Tool For Analyzing Intellectual Property, Stephen M. Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This piece reviews Economic and Legal Dimensions, which presents a pragmatic economic theory about the proper remedies in intellectual property cases. The book shows in a number of areas how remedies play a crucial role in defining intellectual property rights, and how to improve the law. The first part of the review presents the authors' general theory. The second part tests how the theory succeeds in explaining the existing law on remedies in intellectual property. The third part analyzes how the theory could be used to bring considerable clarity to murky areas such as standing to sue, liability standards, measurement …

Judging Expertise In Copyright Law, 14 J. Intell. Prop. L. 1 (2006), William K. Ford

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.