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Full-Text Articles in Law
Intellectual Property Law Hybridization, Clark D. Asay
Intellectual Property Law Hybridization, Clark D. Asay
Faculty Scholarship
Traditionally, patent and copyright laws have been viewed as separate bodies of law with distinct utilitarian goals. The conventional wisdom holds that patent law aims to incentivize the production of inventive ideas, while copyright focuses on protecting the original expression of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. This customary divide between patent and copyright laws finds some support in the Constitution’s Intellectual Property Clause, and Congress, courts, and scholars have largely perpetuated it in enacting, interpreting, and analyzing copyright and patent laws over time.
In this Article, I argue that it is time to partially breach this traditional divide. …
The Psychology Of Patent Protection, Stephanie Plamondon Bair
The Psychology Of Patent Protection, Stephanie Plamondon Bair
Faculty Scholarship
This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the major justifications for our patent system using a behavioral psychology framework. Applying insights from the behavioral literature that I argue more accurately account for the realities of human action than previous analytical tools, I critically evaluate each of the major justifications for patents — incentive theory, disclosure theory, prospect theory, commercialization theory, patent racing theory, and non-utilitarian theories. I ask whether our current patent system is an effective regime for meeting the stated goals of these accounts. When the answer to this question is no, I again turn to the behavioral …
Adjustments, Extensions, Disclaimers, And Continuations: When Do Patent Term Adjustments Make Sense?, Stephanie Plamondon Bair
Adjustments, Extensions, Disclaimers, And Continuations: When Do Patent Term Adjustments Make Sense?, Stephanie Plamondon Bair
Faculty Scholarship
The United States patent system represents a measured trade-off between two competing policy considerations: providing sufficient incentives to encourage the innovation and development of new and socially useful inventions; and ensuring that such inventions are readily available to the public at an affordable price. Although the default patent term is now twenty years from filing, various features of, and changes to, the patent system over the years have allowed patent owners to extend the duration of their patent monopolies, sometimes for several years. Such extensions, though seemingly insignificant when compared to the full patent term, have an enormous impact on …