Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Law
Raising The Threshold For Trademark Infringement Protect Free Expression, Christine Haight Farley, Lisa P. Ramsey
Raising The Threshold For Trademark Infringement Protect Free Expression, Christine Haight Farley, Lisa P. Ramsey
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The First Amendment right to free speech limits the scope of rights in trademark law. Congress and the courts have devised various defenses and common law doctrines to ensure that protected speech is exempted from trademark infringement liability. These defensive trademark doctrines, however, are narrow and often vary by jurisdiction. One current example is the speech-protective test first articulated by the Second Circuit in Rogers v. Grimaldi, expanded by the Ninth Circuit, and recently restricted by the Supreme Court in Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products to uses of another’s mark within an expressive work that do not designate the …
Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan
Securing Patent Law, Charles Duan
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
A vigorous conversation about intellectual property rights and national security has largely focused on the defense role of those rights, as tools for responding to acts of foreign infringement. But intellectual property, and patents in particular, also play an arguably more important offense role. Foreign competitor nations can obtain and assert U.S. patents against U.S. firms and creators. Use of patents as an offense strategy can be strategically coordinated to stymie domestic innovation and technological progress. This Essay considers current and possible future practices of patent exploitation in this offense setting, with a particular focus on China given the nature …
Intellectual Property Law Gets Experienced, Victoria Phillips
Intellectual Property Law Gets Experienced, Victoria Phillips
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Introduction: A decade ago, in Clinical Legal Education and the Public Interest in Intellectual Property Law, I described with my faculty colleagues our motivations for launching a public interest intellectual property law clinic at the American University Washington College of Law. That article introduced our goals and framework for a pioneering clinic framed around a variety of live-client student representations performed under close faculty supervision, weekly case rounds focusing on issues experienced directly by the students in their representations, and a seminar built around a year-long lawyering simulation addressing the public interest dimensions of intellectual property. In that article, we …
Territorial Exclusivity In U.S. Copyright And Trademark Law, Christine Farley
Territorial Exclusivity In U.S. Copyright And Trademark Law, Christine Farley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Currently, U.S. trademark and copyright law both adopt employ a regime of international exhaustion of rights with respect to parallel importation after the Supreme Court ruled in Kirtsaeng last term. This agreement belies the fact that these two areas of law have developed in nearly divergent directions and have resulted in faltering intellectual property and trade policies. Currently, interpretation of the first sale doctrine hinges on the particular legal characteristics of both trademarks and copyrights. When dealing with trademarks, courts ultimately focus on the source of origin, taking into account consumer expectations or, instead, focusing on the business relationship, if …
Trips-Plus Trade And Investment Agreements: Why More May Be Less For Economic Development, Christine Farley
Trips-Plus Trade And Investment Agreements: Why More May Be Less For Economic Development, Christine Farley
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Conventional wisdom -- but not empirical research -- maintains that strong intellectual property (“IP”) rights trigger not only foreign direct investment, but also local innovation. Thus investors seek, and developing countries compete to offer, the highest levels of IP protections. But evaluating the level of IP protection in any given country has become increasingly complex. A proliferation of bilateral agreements, such as free trade agreements (“FTAs”) and bilateral investment treaties (“BITs”), intended to enhance the minimum standards set forth in The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (“TRIPS”), have created uncertainty about precisely what IP protections are …
In Personam And Beyond The Grasp: In Search Of Jurisdiction And Accountability For Foreign Defendants, Andrew Popper
In Personam And Beyond The Grasp: In Search Of Jurisdiction And Accountability For Foreign Defendants, Andrew Popper
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The focus of this article is on the difficulty of securing in personam jurisdiction over foreign entities who steal information technology and intellectual property (IT and IP). The value of stolen IT and IP is somewhere in the range of a trillion dollars over the last decade. Given the current inability to prevent those losses or deter meaningfully those engaged in the misconduct, the article explores the core of the problem: the difficulty of satisfying the minimum contact/fairness requirements of Article III courts. The article addresses several alternative approaches that might allow for more efficient protection of IT and IP. …