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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Patent Lottery: Exploiting Behavioral Economics For The Common Good, Dennis D. Crouch
The Patent Lottery: Exploiting Behavioral Economics For The Common Good, Dennis D. Crouch
Faculty Publications
Lotteries are immensely popular. Players are willing to give the organizer a large monetary cut of every ticket purchase in return for a chance at a jackpot. In some ways, our current patent system operates as a lottery as well. Most patents are relatively worthless, while a few are highly valuable. Reaching the major payout of a highly valuable patent takes perseverance in the face of tremendous uncertainty. Like lottery players, small entrepreneurial companies and individuals have shows signs of bounded rationality. In particular, what I call the patent lottery effect is associated with the phenomena of potential innovators overweighting …
Level Of Skill And Long-Felt Need: Notes On A Forgotten Future, Joe Miller
Level Of Skill And Long-Felt Need: Notes On A Forgotten Future, Joe Miller
Scholarly Works
The Supreme Court's KSR decision transforms the way we think about patent law's ordinary artisan. The ordinary artisan, the Supreme Court states, is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton. This transformation, which sweeps aside a contrary precept that had informed the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence for a generation, raises a key question: How do we fill out the rest of our conception, in a given case, of the ordinary artisan's level of skill at the time the invention was made? Reaching back to a large vein of case law typified by Judge Learned Hand's decisions about nonobviousness, …
Patents, Taxes And The Nuclear Option: Do We Need A “Tax Strategy Patent” Ban?, Max Oppenheimer
Patents, Taxes And The Nuclear Option: Do We Need A “Tax Strategy Patent” Ban?, Max Oppenheimer
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
New Research Uses For Patent And Trademark Data, Roger V. Skalbeck
New Research Uses For Patent And Trademark Data, Roger V. Skalbeck
Law Faculty Publications
In this article, I examine alternative uses for information found in patent and trademark filing databases, suggesting ways to locate a law firm's clients, perform competitive intelligence, and locate or investigate expert witnesses. Finally, I talk about an interesting non-law use of patent data, i.e., historical research.
Appropriate Patent Rules In Developing Countries - Some Deliberations Based On Thai Legislation, Jakkrit Kuanpoth
Appropriate Patent Rules In Developing Countries - Some Deliberations Based On Thai Legislation, Jakkrit Kuanpoth
Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)
TRIPS Agreement mandates adequate and effective protection for all inventions regardless of the field of technology. The fundamental questions are whether the extent of protection of pharmaceuticals will be beneficial for the socio-economic development of developing countries and how can the impact of the new system be monitored and controlled in the interests of the concerned countries and their populations. Under the Thai Patent Law, Section 46.50 provides for the grant of compulsory licenses, which in practical terms are difficult to implement so much so that no such licenses have been granted since 1979 when the Act came into force. …
Current Patent Laws Cannot Claim The Backing Of Human Rights - 2008, Wendy J. Gordon
Current Patent Laws Cannot Claim The Backing Of Human Rights - 2008, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
The majority of the world's countries (one exception being the United States) have undertaken a commitment at the level of human rights to protect the interests of persons who author 'scientific ... production[s]'. This commitment is embodied in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which recognizes in Article 15.1.(c) the rights of everyone 'to benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.'
What If Seeds Were Not Patentable?, Elizabeth I. Winston
What If Seeds Were Not Patentable?, Elizabeth I. Winston
Scholarly Articles
In 2001, the United States Supreme Court held that seeds were patentable subject matter - a decision, I assert, of much discussion and little impact. Protection of agricultural intellectual property through private ordering, used both to expand the protection available through public ordering and to circumvent the restrictions public ordering places on owners of intellectual property, has provided the incentives necessary to promote investment and innovation in seeds. It has not been the patentability of seeds that has led to agricultural advances, but rather the profitability of licensing agricultural intellectual property. What if seeds were not patentable? So what if …
Heightened Enablement In The Unpredictable Arts, Sean B. Seymore
Heightened Enablement In The Unpredictable Arts, Sean B. Seymore
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
A bedrock principle of patent law is that an applicant must sufficiently disclose the invention in exchange for the right to exclude. The essential facet of the disclosure requirement is enablement, which compels a patent applicant to enable a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) how to make and use the full scope of the claimed invention without undue experimentation. Enablement problems may arise when the applicant claims an invention broadly with a dearth of supporting data or examples. This is problematic in unpredictable fields like chemistry because a PHOSITA often needs a specific and detailed teaching in …
Intellectual Property For Market Experimentation, Michael B. Abramowicz, John F. Duffy
Intellectual Property For Market Experimentation, Michael B. Abramowicz, John F. Duffy
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Intellectual property protects investments in the production of information, but the literature on the topic has largely neglected one type of information that intellectual property might protect: information about the market success of goods and services. A first entrant into a market often cannot prevent other firms from free-riding on information about consumer demand and market feasibility. Despite the existence of some first-mover advantages, the incentives to be the first entrant into a market may sometimes be inefficiently low, thereby giving rise to a net first-mover disadvantage and discouraging innovation. Intellectual property may counteract this inefficiency by providing market exclusivity, …
Remixing Obviousness, Joseph S. Miller
Remixing Obviousness, Joseph S. Miller
Scholarly Works
In April 2007, the Supreme Court, for the first time in 41 years, decided a case about the basic contours of patent law's nonobviousness standard. The case, KSR, upends 25 years of Federal Circuit jurisprudence, and on a legal requirement that every patent must satisfy. In this essay, I show how KSR dismantles two predicates that have long shaped Federal Circuit nonobviousness cases - namely, the intertwined premises that hindsight-driven distortion is the gravest risk to an accurate nonobviousness requirement, and that the person of ordinary skill in the art (from whose perspective nonobviousness is judge) is singularly uncreative. In …
Do Patents Perform Like Property?, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen
Do Patents Perform Like Property?, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
Do patents provide critical incentives to encourage investment in innovation? Or, instead, do patents impose legal risks and burdens on innovators that discourage innovation, as some critics now claim? This paper reviews empirical economic evidence on how well patents perform as a property system.
Moral Philosophy, Information Technology, And Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon
Moral Philosophy, Information Technology, And Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
A plethora of philosophical issues arise where copyright and patent laws intersect with information technology. Given the necessary brevity of the chapter, my strategy will be to make general observations that can be applied to illuminate one particular issue. I have chosen the issue considered in MGM v. Grokster,2 a recent copyright case from the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster, Ltd., provided a decentralized peer-to-peer technology that many people, typically students, used to copy and distribute music in ways that violated copyright law. The Supreme Court addressed the extent to which Grokster and other technology providers should be held …
Recent Developments Affecting The Enforcement, Procurement, And Licensing Of Research Tool Patents, Joshua D. Sarnoff, Christopher M. Holman
Recent Developments Affecting The Enforcement, Procurement, And Licensing Of Research Tool Patents, Joshua D. Sarnoff, Christopher M. Holman
Faculty Works
A vigorous discussion exists regarding the need to provide exclusive patent rights as incentives to invent and to disclose so-called "research tools," whether such exclusive rights should apply to all uses and users of patented research tools, and whether exclusive rights to prohibit all uses of research tools would unduly discourage sequential invention. This article summarizes recent developments under U.S. patent laws of particular relevance to the debate over the patenting of research tools, and provides some insights into the practices of various academic sciences, industries, and government agencies regarding the treatment of these important inventions. The article provides a …
Patent Carrots And Sticks: A Model Of Nonobviousness, Michael J. Meurer
Patent Carrots And Sticks: A Model Of Nonobviousness, Michael J. Meurer
Faculty Scholarship
The authors develop an informal model of the impact of the nonobviousness standard on the choice of research projects. Previous models assume that the basic question confronting a researcher is, "Shall I produce this particular invention?" More realistically, the authors think a researcher asks, "Which research path shall I pursue?" The model shows that a patent serves as a carrot to induce the choice of more difficult projects than would be pursued under the no-patent alternative. The nonobviousness standard serves as a stick to prod researchers to choose even more difficult projects. The results of the model help us understand …
The "Reasonable Plant" Test: When Progress Outruns The Constitution, Max Oppenheimer
The "Reasonable Plant" Test: When Progress Outruns The Constitution, Max Oppenheimer
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.