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Four Questionable Rationales For The Patent Misuse Doctrine, Thomas F. Cotter
Four Questionable Rationales For The Patent Misuse Doctrine, Thomas F. Cotter
Thomas F. Cotter
When a patent infringement defendant succeeds in proving that the patent owner has misused its patent, the patent is rendered unenforceable unless and until the misuse is purged. Case law has never clearly articulated precise criteria for determining the boundaries of the misuse doctrine, however. Although the misuse doctrine overlaps to some extent with substantive antitrust law, for example, under current law not every instance of misuse is necessarily an antitrust violation, and not every patent-related antitrust violation necessarily constitutes misuse. In this paper, I identify four possible justifications for the patent misuse doctrine that, in theory, could provide guidance …
An Economic Analysis Of Patent Law's Inequitable Conduct Doctrine, Thomas F. Cotter
An Economic Analysis Of Patent Law's Inequitable Conduct Doctrine, Thomas F. Cotter
Thomas F. Cotter
In recent years, patent law’s inequitable conduct doctrine has attracted considerable attention from judges, legislators, patent lawyers and commentators, culminating most recently in the Federal Circuit’s decision to reconsider en banc several aspects of the doctrine in Therasense, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson & Co. Building on the work of other scholars, this Article proposes an instrumental view of the doctrine as, ideally, a tool for inducing patent applicants to disclose the optimal quantity of information relating to the patentability of their inventions; it then presents a formal model of the applicant’s choices in deciding how much information to reveal. The …