Law Commons^™

Global Patents: Limits Of Transnational Enforcement, Marketa Trimble

Boyd Briefs / Road Scholars

Professor Marketa Trimble presented these materials at the University of Macerata on November 6, 2013. The presentation discussed the increase in transnational patent litigation and what governments must do to protect patent owners in a globalized economy.

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Akron Law Faculty Publications

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Overlapping Intellectual Property Doctrines: Election Of Rights Versus Selection Of Remedies, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Overlaps exist across various doctrines in federal intellectual property law. Software can be protected under both copyright law and patent law; logos can be protected under both copyright law and trademark law. Design patents provide a particular opportunity to consider the issue of overlap, as an industrial design that qualifies for design patent protection might also, in particular circumstances, qualify for copyright protection as well as function as protectable trade dress.

When an overlap issue arises—that is, when an intellectual property rights holder asserts rights under more than one doctrine—the question then becomes how courts should respond. One response, of …

Activating Actavis, Aaron Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc., the Supreme Court provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. The Court came down strongly in favor of an antitrust solution to the problem, concluding that “an antitrust action is likely to prove more feasible administratively than the Eleventh Circuit believed.” At the same time, Justice Breyer’s majority opinion acknowledged that the Court did not answer every relevant question. The opinion closed by “leav[ing] to the lower courts the structuring of the present rule-of-reason antitrust litigation.”

This article is an effort to help courts and …

Reverse Payments, Perverse Incentives, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Issuing and enforcing prescription drug patents requires courts and legislatures to strike a delicate balance. A patent gives drug manufacturers a legal, if temporary, monopoly on sales of a drug; this encourages manufacturers to engage in costly research and development of new medicines. But not all patents issued by the Patent Office are ultimately deemed valid – generic drug manufacturers can infringe the patent, and, when sued, attack its validity in court on a variety of grounds, including obviousness. In recent years, patent holders have begun to settle these suits (which they initiated) by paying the alleged infringer. Not surprisingly, …

Santa Clara Law Best Practices In Patent Litigation Survey, Colleen Chien, Nicole Shanahan, Daniel Dobkin, Wesley Helmholz, Coryn Millslagle, Christopher Patrick Tosetti

Faculty Publications

Over the past few years, Congress, appellate, and district courts have made significant strides to improve patent law and litigation practice. Congress is now considering making more changes, to supplement ongoing tailoring by the courts. Dialog between the patent bench, patent bar, and lawmakers is crucial for informing these efforts. To support this dialog, we developed, in consultation with judges and company lawyers in spring of 2013, a list of questions to probe the experiences, opinions, and suggestions of lawyers. We asked survey takers to rate, on a range from ineffective to very effective, certain existing and proposed practices and …

Aamodt Litigation Settlement Agreement (Pueblos Of Nambé, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso & Tesuque), United States, State Of New Mexico, Pueblo Of Tesuque, Pueblo Of San Ildefonso, Pueblo Of Nambé, Pueblo Of Pojoaque

Native American Water Rights Settlement Project

Settlement Agreement: Aamodt Litigation Settlement Agreement (Apr. 19, 2012). 66cv06639, USDC, DCNM. (final signatures Mar. 27,2013) Parties: Pueblos of Nambé, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso & Tesuque, US, NM, Santa Fe County, City of Santa Fe. The key provisions of the Aamodt settlement include: 1) constructing a Regional Water System; 2) providing non-Indians a choice of whether to join the settlement and upon joining, a choice of whether to connect to the Regional Water System for domestic water; 3) relinquishment of existing Pueblo claims against non-Indians who join the Settlement; 4) closing the Pojoaque Basin to new water right development following the …

Explaining The ‘Unpredictable’: An Empirical Analysis Of U.S. Patent Infringement Awards, Samantha Zyontz, Michael J. Mazzeo, Jonathan Hillel

Faculty Scholarship

Patent infringement awards are commonly thought to be unpredictable, which raises concerns that patents can lead to unjust enrichment and impede the progress of innovation. We investigate the unpredictability of patent damages by conducting a large-scale econometric analysis of award values. We begin by analyzing the outcomes of 340 cases decided in US federal courts between 1995 and 2008 in which infringement was found and damages were awarded. Our data include the amount awarded, along with information about the litigants, case specifics and economic value of the patents-at-issue. Using these data, we construct an econometric model that explains over 75% …

The Federal Circuit As A Federal Court, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals and, as a consequence, the last word on many legal issues important to innovation policy. This Article shows how the Federal Circuit augments its already significant power by impeding other government institutions from influencing the patent system. Specifically, the Federal Circuit has shaped patent-law doctrine, along with rules of jurisdiction, procedure, and administrative law, to preserve and expand the court’s power in four interinstitutional relationships: the court’s federalism relationship with state courts, its separation of powers relationship with the executive and legislative branches, its vertical …

Competitive Patent Law, William Hubbard

All Faculty Scholarship

Can U.S. patent law help American businesses compete in global markets? In early 2011, President Barack Obama argued that, to obtain economic prosperity, the United States must "out-innovate . .. the rest of the world,"¹ and that patent reform is a "critical dimension[]" ² of this innovation agenda. Soon thereafter, Congress enacted the most sweeping reforms to U.S. patent law in more than half a century, contending that the changes will "give American inventors and innovators the 21st century patent system they need to compete."³ Surprisingly, no legal scholar has assessed whether patent reform is capable of making …

Standards Of Proof In Civil Litigation: An Experiment From Patent Law, David L. Schwartz, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

Standards of proof are widely assumed to matter in litigation. They operate to allocate the risk of error between litigants, as well as to indicate the relative importance attached to the ultimate decision. But despite their perceived importance, there have been relatively few empirical studies testing jurors’ comprehension and application of standards of proof, particularly in civil litigation. Patent law recently presented an opportunity to assess the potential impact of varying the standard of proof in civil cases. In Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership, the Supreme Court held that a patent’s presumption of validity can only be overcome by …

Book Review: "Die Gemeinfreiheit: Begriff, Funktion, Dogmatik (The Public Domain: Concept, Function, Dogmatics)" By Alexander Peukert, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

The reviewer considers a recent book by Alexander Peukert, the professor of civil and commercial law who specializes in international intellectual property law at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Peukert has devoted the book to defining the limits of the public domain – the realm of intellectual activity in which works are free for anyone to use because the works are not protected by intellectual property rights, are protected but the protection has expired, are subject to an exception to the rights under the law, or are unprotected because the owner of the rights chooses not to enforce …

Does The Us Patent System Need A Patent Small Claims Proceeding?, Colleen Chien, Michael J. Guo

Faculty Publications

Patent litigation is expensive. The primary motivation for the creation of a patent small claims proceeding is to make enforcement more affordable. However, in the twenty or so years since the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) first endorsed the idea of a small claims patent court through Resolution 401‐4, the patent litigation landscape has drastically changed. Although patent litigation costs are still high, the equities have shifted. The marketplace for patents has developed, providing more options than previously existed to monetize and assert patents. However, the cost of patent defense has not gone down, and small companies cannot afford …

10 Things The Pto Can Do To Enhance Context-Based Patent Disclosure, Colleen Chien

Faculty Publications

The PTO held a roundtable and solicited comments on a proposal to require Real-Party-in-Interest disclosures in patents. Through this comment, which I submitted to the PTO, I support their efforts to elicit and disseminate ownership data by 1) explaining why ownership information, and context-information in particular, is so important to the core functions of the patent system of technology transfer and technology commercialization; 2) commending and suggesting several steps the PTO could take/continue to take to improve the quality, quantity, and dissemination of ownership information; and 3) providing an Appendix that summarizes each of the 17 comments that the PTO …

And How: Mayo V. Prometheus And The Method Of Invention, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The Mayo Court's novel test for patent eligibility — whether or not an invention involves “well-understood, routine, conventional activity, previously engaged in by researchers in the field” — focuses on how an invention is accomplished rather than what an invention is. That concern with the method of invention poses several normative, statutory, and administrative difficulties. Taken seriously, the “how” requirement will likely have broad effects across all levels of patent practice.

Patent Infringement As Criminal Conduct, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Criminal and civil law differ greatly in their use of the element of intent. The purposes of intent in each legal system are tailored to effectuate very different goals. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060 (2011), however, imported a criminal concept of intent — willful blindness — into the statute for patent infringement, a civil offense, despite these differences. This importation of a criminal law concept of intent into the patent statute is novel and calls for examination. This Article compares the purposes behind intent in criminal law with the …

Federal Trade Commission V. Actavis, Inc. And Reverse-Payment Or Pay-For-Delay Settlements, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

An imminent US Supreme Court ruling should resolve one of the thorniest legal issues facing pharmaceutical companies today.

Government Choices In Innovation Funding (With Reference To Climate Change), Joshua Sarnoff

College of Law Faculty

Huge amounts of money will soon be spent by governments and private entities to develop technology to reduce the costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to deploy new energy and transportation infrastructures. Incredibly, we still lack any good idea of the best means of providing massive amounts of government or private money so as to promote the most innovation and technology diffusion at the lowest cost. This Article seeks to support better analyses of, and decision making regarding, the choices of government innovation-funding mechanisms by discussing the limits of current analyses and providing a taxonomy of such measures. …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, James Ming Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Thomas Folsom, Timothy S. Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank A. Pasquale, Elizabeth A. Reilly, Jeffery Samuels, Katherine J. Strandburg, Kara W. Swanson, Andrew W. Torrance, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Faculty Scholarship

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions. Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Fashion And U.S. Ip Law, Marketa Trimble

Boyd Briefs / Road Scholars

No abstract provided.

American Innovation And The Limits Of Patent Law: A Response To William Hubbard, Competitive Patent Law, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

In his recent article Competitive Patent Law, Professor William Hubbard makes a valuable contribution regarding an underexplored aspect of patent law’s ability to encourage innovation — namely, “whether U.S. patent law can be tailored to provide U.S. innovators with enhanced incentives to invent” compared to foreign rivals, and thus by extension make American firms more competitive in the global marketplace. This brief response addresses three aspects of Professor Hubbard’s thoughtful and well-written article. First, it critiques the article’s contention that the United States is currently facing an “innovation gap.” Second, it critically evaluates the claim that patent law can play …

The Competitive Advantage Of Weak Patents, William Hubbard

All Faculty Scholarship

Does U.S. patent law increase the competitiveness of U.S. firms in global markets? This Article argues that, contrary to the beliefs of many U.S. lawmakers, U.S. patent law currently undermines the ability of U.S. firms to compete in global markets because strong U.S. patent rights actually weaken an overlooked but critical determinant of U.S. competitiveness: rivalry among U.S. firms. Intense domestic rivalry drives firms to improve relentlessly, spawns related and supporting domestic industries, and encourages the domestic development of advanced factors of production—like specialized labor forces. U.S. patents restrict rivalry among foreign firms less because U.S. patents have little extraterritorial …

The Corporate Preference For Trade Secret, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Many inventions can be legally protected either by patent or by trade secrecy, and a conventional wisdom exists on how to select between them. This Article adds to that literature by showing that corporations should have an inherent preference for trade secret over patent for reasons relating to their legal form. Among them is the idea that corporations are perpetual entities and therefore perfectly suited to reap the perpetual returns that only a trade secret can offer. The Article also addresses the potential for a conflict between the inherent corporate preference for trade secret and the preferences of corporate managers, …

Technological Cost As Law In Intellectual Property, Harry Surden

Publications

Changes in the scope of IP legal rights are generally thought to be linked to changes in positive law. This Article argues that shifts in the scope of IP laws are often driven by changes in technological feasibility and not by changes in positive law. Diminishing technological constraint is an under-acknowledged factor driving changes in substantive IP law.

More specifically, there are certain activities that are core to IP law. Such activities include, for example, the copying of creative works in copyright (e.g. duplicating books or music), or the manufacturing of products in patent law. Traditionally, IP legal theory has …

Patent Landscape Of Helminth Vaccines And Related Technologies, Jon R. Cavicchi, Stanley P. Kowalski, John Schroeder, Rayna Burke, Jillian Michaud-King

Law Faculty Scholarship

Executive Summary This report focuses on patent landscape analysis of technologies related to vaccines targeting parasitic worms, also known as helminths. These technologies include methods of formulating vaccines, methods of producing of subunits, the composition of complete vaccines, and other technologies that have the potential to aid in a global response to this pathogen. The purpose of this patent landscape study was to search, identify, and categorize patent documents that are relevant to the development of vaccines that can efficiently promote the development of protective immunity against helminths. The search strategy used keywords which the team felt would be general …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, James Ming Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Thomas Folsom, Timothy S. Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank A. Pasquale Iii, Elizabeth A. Reilly, Jeffrey Samuels, Katherine J. Strandburg, Kara W. Swanson, Andrew W. Torrance, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Law Faculty Scholarship

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions. Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Informal Deference: A Historical, Empirical, And Normative Analysis Of Patent Claim Construction, Jonas Anderson, Peter S. Menell

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Patent scope plays a central role in the operation of the patent system, making patent claim construction a critical aspect of just about every patent litigation. With the resurgence of patent jury trials in the 1980s, the allocation of responsibility for interpreting patent claims between trial judge and jury emerged as a salient issue. While the Supreme Court’s Markman decision usefully removed claim construction from the black box of jury deliberations notwithstanding its "mongrel" mixed fact/law character, the Federal Circuit's adherence to the view that claim construction is a pure question of law subject to de novo appellate review produced …

What's A Name Worth?: Experimental Tests Of The Value Of Attribution In Intellectual Property, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Christopher Buccafusco, Zachary Burns

Articles

Despite considerable research suggesting that creators value attribution – i.e., being named as the creator of a work – U.S. intellectual property (IP) law does not provide a right to attribution to the vast majority of creators. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many European countries give creators, at least in their copyright laws, much stronger rights to attribution. At first blush it may seem that the U.S. has gotten it wrong, and the Europeans have made a better policy choice in providing to creators a right that they value. But for reasons we will explain in this …

Patent Applications And The Performance Of The U.S. Patent And Trademark Office, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

This Article reports data and analyses to facilitate answering these questions. The reported data was obtained from two sources. The first is the Workload Tables from the USPTO annual reports, called the "USPTO Performance and Accountability Reports," provided to the President, Congress, and public.' The second is data received from the USPTO in response to Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") requests.3 From these two data sources, information such as the number of applications filed per year, the type of applications being filed and prosecuted, the pendency of these applications, and their disposition, including the number of them issued as patents, …

What If Extinction Is Not Forever?, Jacob S. Sherkow

Other Publications

No abstract provided.