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Trust: A Model For Disclosure In Patent Law, Ari Ezra Waldman

Indiana Law Journal

How to draw the line between public and private is a foundational, first-principles question of privacy law, but the answer has implications for intellectual property, as well. This project is one in a series of papers about first-person disclosures of information in the privacy and intellectual property law contexts, and it defines the boundary between public and nonpublic information through the lens of social science —namely, principles of trust.

Patent law’s public use bar confronts the question of whether legal protection should extend to information previously disclosed to a small group of people. I present evidence that shows that current …