Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Patent Venue Exceptionalism After Tc Heartland V. Kraft, Ana Santos Rutschman

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fixing Forum Selling, Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

University of Miami Business Law Review

“Forum selling” is jurisdictional competition intended to attract litigants. While consensual forum selling may be beneficial, non-consensual forum selling is harmful because it encourages jurisdictions to adopt an inefficient pro-plaintiff bias. In the last 20 years, the Eastern District of Texas has adopted an aggressive and remarkably successful policy of non-consensual forum selling in patent infringement actions. In 2016, 44% of all patent infringement actions were filed in the Eastern District of Texas, and 93% of them were filed by patent assertion entities or “patent trolls.”

In December 2016, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in TC Heartland v. Kraft, …

The Immanent Rationality Of Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Michigan Law Review

Review of What’s Wrong with Copying? by Abraham Drassinower.

Retooling The Intellectual Property-Antitrust Intersection: Insights From Behavioral Economics, 69 Baylor L. Rev. 124 (2017), Daryl Lim

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that courts should operationalize insights offered by behavioral economics in developing jurisprudence at the patent-antitrust interface.

Retooling The Intellectual Property-Antitrust Intersection: Insights From Behavioral Economics, Daryl Lim

Faculty Scholarly Works

This Article argues that courts should operationalize insights offered by behavioral economics in developing jurisprudence at the patent-antitrust interface.

Abuse Of The Hatch-Waxman Act: Mylan's Ability To Monopolize Reflects Weaknesses, Kieran Meagher

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, better known as the Hatch-Waxman Act, is intended to lower the average price paid by consumers for prescription drugs. The Hatch-Waxman Act attempts to do so by simplifying the application process for generic drug manufacturers, allowing generic drug applications to circumvent the lengthy FDA testing and approval process that brand-name manufacturers must undergo. Though the Hatch-Waxman Act has successfully created a clear path to the market for generic drugs, it contains loopholes that allow brand name and generic companies to engage in practices aimed at maximizing monopoly profits, effectively …

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other …

Trademarks And Unfair Competition, Clarisa Long

Faculty Scholarship

Chapter 9 summarizes the dominant law and economic approach to some of the doctrines comprising the two major strands of modern trademark law: classic trademark law, in which trademark protection is justified as reducing consumer search costs and preventing consumer confusion; and dilution law, which is explained by the more traditional intellectual property justifications of encouraging investment in creating valuable marks and protecting producer goodwill. It argues that the culmination of trademark law in the form of protection against dilution represents completion of a full circle of development of unfair competition law. From its start as a means of protecting …

Optimal Remedies For Patent Infringement, Keith N. Hylton, Mengxi Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

This paper derives optimal remedies for patent infringement, examining damages awards and injunctions. The fundamental optimality condition that applies to both awards and injunctions equates the marginal static cost of intellectual property protection with the marginal “dynamic” benefit from the innovation thereby induced. When the social value of the patent is sufficiently high, the optimal award induces socially efficient investment by giving the innovator the entire social value of her investment.

Brief Of Amici Curiae - 56 Professors Of Law And Economics In Support Of Petition For Writ Of Certiorari In Tc Heartland Llc V. Kraft Foods Group Brands Llc, No. 16-341, Colleen V. Chien, Mark Lemley, Brian Love, Arti K. Rai

Historical and Topical Legal Documents

28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) provides that a defendant in a patent case may be sued where the defendant is incorporated or has a regular and established place of business and has infringed the patent. This Court made clear in Fourco Glass Co. v. Transmirra Prods. Corp., 353 U.S. 222, 223 (1957), that those were the only permissible venues for a patent case. But the Federal Circuit has rejected Fourco and the plain meaning of § 1400(b), instead permitting a patent plaintiff to file suit against a defendant anywhere there is personal jurisdiction over that defendant. The result has been rampant …

Colloquium On Certain Legal Aspects Of Foreign Investment In Mexico: Regulations Of Capital Investment, Patent And Trademarks, And Transfer Of Technology (Introduction And Initial Comments), Gabriel M. Wilner

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Through The Lens Of Innovation, Mirit Eyal-Cohen

Florida State University Law Review

The legal system constantly follows the footsteps of innovation and attempts to discourage its migration overseas. Yet, present legal rules that inform and explain entrepreneurial circumstances lack a core understanding of the concept of entrepreneurship. By its nature, law imposes order. It provides rules, remedies, and classifications that direct behavior in a consistent manner. Entrepreneurship turns on the contrary. It entails making creative judgments about the unknown. It involves adapting to disarray. It thrives on deviation as opposed to traditional causation. This Article argues that these differences matter. It demonstrates that current laws lock entrepreneurs into inefficient legal routes. Through …

Innovation Prizes In Practice And Theory, Michael J. Burstein, Fiona Murray

Articles

Innovation prizes in reality are significantly different from innovation prizes in theory. The former are familiar from popular accounts of historical prizes like the Longitude Prize: the government offers a set amount for a solution to a known problem, like £20,000 for a method of calculating longitude at sea. The latter are modeled as compensation to inventors in return for donating their inventions to the public domain. Neither the economic literature nor the policy literature that led to the 2010 America COMPETES Reauthorization Act — which made prizes a prominent tool of government innovation policy — provides a satisfying justification …

Dilution, An Idea Whose Time Has Gone; Brand Equity As Protectable Property, The New/Old Paradigm, Jerre B. Swann, Theodore H. Davis Jr.

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Community Economic Development, Legal Clinic Program

Course Descriptions and Information

This clinic emphasizes transactional practice skills. This clinic provides short term counseling in a broad range of small business matters such as corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships, intellectual property, copyright, trademark, privacy law, nonprofit organizations, art groups as well as the legal requirements for starting a small business. Students provide direct legal assistance, counseling, representation, community legal education, and informational materials to new and mature for-profit and non-profit organizations, individuals and community groups seeking to better the economic, social, equitable and cultural well-being of low income communities.

The Biblical Fool And The Brander: The Law And Economics Of Propertization In American Trademark Law, William P. Kratzke

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Isaiah 35:8, which tells of 'fools" upon a highway who shall not err, became authority for the position that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should protect fools from deception. This Article examines the biblical passage in context and concludes that it does not support protection of unthinking, credulous people. Ensuing FTC orders based on witnesses' speculation of how fools would construe particular claims actually harmed fools. The FTC retreated Unfortunately, the objective of protecting fools from deception has taken over § 43(a) Lanham Act jurisprudence-but now sellers speculate in competitor lawsuits how fools will construe competitors' claims and undertake to …

Facilitating Competition By Remedial Regulation, Kristelia A. García

Publications

In music licensing, powerful music publishers have begun—for the first time ever— to withdraw their digital copyrights from the collectives that license those rights, in order to negotiate considerably higher rates in private deals. At the beginning of the year, two of these publishers commanded a private royalty rate nearly twice that of the going collective rate. This result could be seen as a coup for the free market: Constrained by consent decrees and conflicting interests, collectives are simply not able to establish and enforce a true market rate in the new, digital age. This could also be seen as …

Is The Time Allocated To Review Patent Applications Inducing Examiners To Grant Invalid Patents?: Evidence From Micro-Level Application Data, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman

Faculty Scholarship

We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination-time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.

Brief Of Amici Curiae 56 Professors Of Law And Economics In Support Of Petition Of Writ Of Certiorari, John R. Allison, Margo Bagley, James Bessen, Jeremy Bock, Daniel H. Brean, Michael A. Carrier, Michael W. Carroll, Bernard Chao, Tun-Jen Chiang, Colleen V. Chien, Andrew Chin, Robert Cook-Deegan, Md, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Dr. Dieter Ernst, Samuel F. Ernst, Robin C. Feldman, Lee Fleming, Brian Frye, William Gallagher, Shubha Ghosh, Eric Goldman, Bronwyn H. Hall, Yaniv Heled, Christian Helmers, Joachim Henkel, Susan Helper, Tim Holbrook, Herbert Hovenkamp, William Hubbard, Dr. Xavier Jaravel, Dennis S. Karjala, Peter Lee, Mark A. Lemley, David K. Levine, David S. Levine, Doug Lichtman, Yvette Joy Liebesman, Orly Lobel, Brian Love, Phil Malone, Michael J. Meurer, Dr. Shawn Miller, Matthew Mitchell, Susan Barbieri Montgomery, Sean Pager, Arti K. Rai, Jacob H. Rooksby, Jorge R. Roig, Matthew Sag, Pamela Samuelson, Ana Santos Rutschman, Lea Bishop Shaver, Toshiko Takenaka, John L. Turner, Jennifer Urban, Eric Von Hippel

Faculty Scholarship

28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) provides that a defendant in a patent case may be sued where the defendant is incorporated or has a regular and established place of business and has infringed the patent. This Court made clear in Fourco Glass Co. v. Transmirra Prods. Corp., 353 U.S. 222, 223 (1957), that those were the only permissible venues for a patent case. But the Federal Circuit has rejected Fourco and the plain meaning of § 1400(b), instead permitting a patent plaintiff to file suit against a defendant anywhere there is personal jurisdiction over that defendant. The result has been rampant …

Procrastination In The Workplace: Evidence From The U.S. Patent Office, Michael D. Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman

Faculty Scholarship

Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps by exploring procrastination among U.S. patent examiners. We find that nearly half of examiners’ first substantive reports are completed immediately prior to the operable deadlines. Moreover, we find a range of additional empirical markers to support that this “end-loading” of reviews results from a model of procrastination rather than various alternative time-consistent models of behavior. …

The Defend Trade Secrets Act Of 2015, S. 1890, H.R. 3326, 114th Congress (2015), Joseph K.C. Doukmetzian

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of The United States Tax Laws On International Technology Transfer: An Overview And Some Suggestion For Minimizing The Bite, Marcus B. Finnegan, Robert E. Mccarthy

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Parody And Fair Markets, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

In December 2011, the UK Intellectual Property Office commissioned the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management at Bournemouth University to research the effects of parody on copyrighted works. Do parodies harm the market for the underlying work? How might we measure the economic effects of parody, as incentive depressors or engines?

UK copyright law does not contain an exception specifically covering parodies. The authors of the study perceive the UK copyright law as one of the most restrictive in seven jurisdictions surveyed (US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK) with regard to parodies. By commissioning this research, the UK …

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman

Law & Economics Working Papers

In the 21st century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …

Beyond Incentives: Expanding The Theoretical Framework For Patent Law Analysis, Ofer Tur-Sinai

Akron Law Review

This Article challenges this one-dimensional approach and calls for a more frequent use of non-utilitarian considerations in discussions of the patent system. To be sure, this Article does not call for the complete abolition of economic analysis of patent law, which, despite its shortcomings, remains the most important tool in the evaluation of legal rules in this arena, where the vast majority of the players are motivated primarily by economic considerations. However, it does call for a broader use of non-economic considerations, particularly those embedded in the labor theory and the personality theory, alongside the economic analysis. As will be …

What's It Worth To Keep A Secret?, Gavin C. Reid, Nicola Searle, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Duke Law & Technology Review

This article is the first major study of protection and valuation of trade secrets under federal criminal law. Trade secrecy is more important than ever as an economic complement and substitute for other intellectual property protections, particularly patents. Accordingly, U.S. public policy correctly places a growing emphasis on characterizing the scope of trade secrets, creating incentives for their productive use, and imposing penalties for their theft. Yet amid this complex ecosystem of legal doctrine, economic policy, commercial strategy, and enforcement, there is little research or consensus on how to assign value to trade secrets. One reason for this gap is …

Enabling Patentless Innovation, Clark D. Asay

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Very Specialized United States Generalized System Of Preferences: An Examination Of Renewal Changes And Analysis Of Their Legal Effect, Gregory C. Dorris

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Private Ordering Under Threat Of Regulation, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Occupy Copyright: A Law & Economic Analysis Of U.S. Author Termination Rights, Kate Darling

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.