Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Next Wave: Federal Regulatory, Intellectual Property, And Tort Liability Considerations For Medical Device Software, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 259 (2003), Paul A. Mathew

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Counsel for the medical software technologist faces an unusually complex, ongoing, high-stakes challenge. Counsel operates in a special field of commercial, legal and regulatory forces: (1) intellectual property laws which govern the expression and protection of commercial rights derived from advances in medical science and technology; (2) existing and proposed contracts/warranty laws that govern technological commercial relationships; (3) negligence, professional liability, and product liability laws that govern the marketing of medical technologies; and, (4) a new body of regulation derived from the power of the federal government to indirectly provide for the safety, effectiveness, privacy, and security of medical technologies …

Mary Mary Quite Contrary How Does Your Biodiverse Garden Grow? An Overview Of Intellectual Property Protections For Plants In The United States, Europe, And Japan, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 307 (2003), Jacqueline M. Cohen

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

As we enter further into the boom of the biotechnology era, the role that plants play in our everyday lives continues to grow increasingly more important. This article seeks to provide a general outline of the protections available on a national, as well as, international level for new plant varieties produced through both genetic engineering processes utilized by the biotechnology field, as well as, the "older" methods, such as cross germination, splicing, etc. that are still successfully being utilized by the general scientific community. In the broadest sense this article is designed to help those who are unfamiliar with the …

No-Copy Technology And The Copyright Act: Has The Music Industry Been Allowed To Go Too Far In Diminishing The Consumers’ Personal Use Rights In The Digital World?, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 337 (2003), Kevin C. Earle

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Record companies have in recent years begun production of compact discs containing “no-copy” technology. These CDs appear to be classic CDs but are alleged to have poorer sound quality and often will not play in computers. The recording industryhas used this and other methods to stem the increasing popularity of CD copying and unauthorized music file distribution online. While the right of copyright owners to protect their intellectual property is well established, it is arguable that the methoddescribed herein interferes with a consumer’s right to make personal use of legally purchased content. Such right is alleged to stem from the …

The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine In Illinois: Is It An Inevitable Mistake?, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 379 (2003), Juliet Ruth Otten

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

In several recent decisions, Illinois courts have established that an ex-employee may be restrained from using information from their former employer, that will be "inevitably disclosed", even when no non-competition agreement existed between the employee and the employer. The use of this"inevitable disclosure" doctrine allows Illinois courts to create quasi non-competition agreements even where there has been no actual or threatened misappropriation of an employer's information. This comment proposes that Illinois courts should apply the inevitable disclosure doctrine only when several limiting factors are met and, instead, should encourage employers to use reasonable confidentiality agreements so that neither the employer's …

Can This Brokered Marriage Be Saved? The Changing Relationship Between The Supreme Court And Federal Circuit In Patent Law Jurisprudence, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 201 (2003), Debra D. Peterson

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Congress created the Federal Circuit, in part, to provide uniformity in patent decisions throughout the United States and stability in patent law. During the first decade of the Federal Circuit’s existence, the Supreme Court largely deferred to the Federal Circuit in patent law decisions. However, the Supreme Court’s initial deference to the Federal Circuit has since been replaced by critical view of the Federal Circuit’s decisions and its decision-making processes. This article proposes that the Supreme Court has correctly abandoned its deferential mindset toward the Federal Circuit since the Federal Circuit was never intended to be the de facto Supreme …

Protecting Minor Improvements On Core Patents: Complementing Traditional Patent Protection With Strategic Disclosure, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 398 (2003), Todd E. Rinner

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Managing intellectual property in a manner that achieves its full value is a priority for companies of all types and sizes. Rather than viewing defensive publications as strictly an alternative to patenting, it should be seen as an efficient complement to be utilized in combination with patenting. The development of minor improvements on major inventions presents an attractive situation for combining strategic disclosure with traditional patent protection. Publishing information about a minor improvement will create prior art and prevent competitors from obtaining a patent.By publishing incremental innovations to core patents, a firm can achieve the initialpatent protection necessary to create …

A Hollow Victory For The Common Law? Trips And The Moral Rights Exclusion, 2 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 321 (2003), Monica Kilian

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

With the adoption of moral rights legislation in the United Kingdom and the United States, it appeared that moral rights were on the way to becoming acceptable in Anglo-American jurisdictions. However, the adoption of the TRIPs Agreement expressly excluded the moral rights provision of the Berne Convention. TRIPs signals that all is not well with the integration of moral rights into common law societies. This Article discusses the issues that hamper the acceptance of moral rights. This Article concludes that by bringing economic and moral rights into the same arena and softening the dichotomy of economic versus personal rights, the …

Envisioning Copyright Law's Digital Future, Peter S. Menell

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Computer Programs: A Failed Experiment And A Solution To A Dilemma, William F. Patry

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Our Current Conception Of Copyright Law Survive The Internet Age?, Edward Samuels

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Allowing universities to patent the results of government-sponsored research sometimes works against the public interest.

Cross Border E-Commerce And The Gst/Hst: Towards International Consensus Or Divergence?, Keith R. Evans

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In February 2001, the OECD issued a draft report on ‘‘Consumption Tax Aspects of Electronic Commerce’’. The purpose of this report was to seek comments on Working Party No. 9’s conclusions and recommendations in respect of the approach to be taken on the application of consumption taxes to e-commerce in light of the Ottawa Taxation Framework Conditions. The 1998 Conditions called for the taxation principles that applied to traditional commerce to be the guide for the taxation of e-commerce, to ensure non-discriminatory tax treatment of electronic commerce transactions. In November 2001, the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (‘‘CCRA’’) issued its …

Fragmented Copyright, Fragmented Management: Proposals To Defrag Copyright Management, Daniel Gervais, Alana Maurushat

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The collective management of copyright in Canada was conceived as a solution to alleviate the problem of inefficiency of individual rights management. Creators could not license, collect and enforce copyright efficiently on an individual basis. Requiring users to obtain permission from individual copyright holders for the use of a work was equally inefficient. Collectives, therefore, emerged to facilitate the clearance of rights between creators and users. Even with the facilitation of collectives in the process, clearing rights remains an inherently difficult and convoluted process. This is especially so in the age of the Internet where clearing rights for multimedia products …

Qui Détient Les Droits D'Auteur Sur Les Diverses Productions Des Professeurs D'Université?, René Pépin

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

L’utilisation des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication (NTIC) peut prendre un grand nombre de formes. On peut donner l’exemple, déjà appliqué à certains endroits, où le professeur, en plus de dispenser son enseignement dans un local de cours, place le contenu intégral de son cours sur un serveur de la faculté ou de l’université, avec un genre de babillard électronique dans lequel les étudiants peuvent lui poser des questions, lire ses réponses, ou discuter entre eux de différents sujets. Les étudiants peuvent aussi le contacter par téléphone ou par courriel. La technologie facilite également l’enregistrement des cours …

The Internet Direct Public Offering: Establishing Trust In A Disintermediated Capital Market, Jason Trainor

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Whereas the process of financial intermediation was once human capital and relationship intensive, it is now heavily influenced by technological innovation and consumer demand, factors which have tended to disrupt the monopoly power of financial intermediaries. Technological innovation alone, however, is not sufficient to replace the institutions and actors that previously dominated the market for public offerings; rather, the concept of disintermediation by definition creates a vacuum that must be filled. Law firms and other intermediaries can create additional value for their clients by assuming some or all of the tasks currently apportioned to investment bankers in the public offering …

Reducing Inconsistency In Udrp Cases, David Wotherspoon, Alex Cameron

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The UDRP has proven to be an effective means of resolving domain name disputes. There are, however, a number of shortcomings in the UDRP that affect its legitimacy and fairness. The most glaring of these lies in the failure to delineate the elements outlined in section 4(a) of the UDRP and in the application of Rule 15(a) of the Rules for Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (the ‘‘Rules’’).4 These shortcomings have resulted in inconsistency in the decisions of arbitral panels. As it stands, complainants are unable to ascertain the case they must meet in order to succeed and respondents are …

Information Technology Transactions: Business, Management And Legal Strategies By Dunca Card (Toronto: Carswell, 2002), Michael E. Deturbide

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Although a number of Canadian books have appeared over the past few years addressing the legal issues that have arisen with the explosion in information technology, few have highlighted the practical implica- tions that these legal issues have in technology transac- tions. Duncan Card’s new book, Information Tech- nology Transactions: Business, Management and Legal Strategies, tackles these issues from a practical perspective that will be useful, as the title suggests, to both lawyers and management.

Ucita, Copyright, And Capture, Deborah Tussey

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Silenced Minority: When The Riaa Charges College Radio For Online Broadcasts, Will The Public End Up Paying?, Eleanor Lackman

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Advances in fundamental biomedical research play an important and growing role in the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic products. Although the development of pharmaceutical end products has long been a proprietary enterprise, biomedical research comes from a very different tradition of open science. Within this tradition, long-standing norms call for relatively unfettered access to fundamental knowledge developed by prior researchers. The tradition of open science has eroded considerably over the past quarter century as proprietary claims have reached farther upstream from end products to cover fundamental discoveries that provide the knowledge base for future product development.

The Proposed New Technology Transfer Block Exemption: Is Europe Really Better Off Than With The Current Regulation?, Maurits Dolmans, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the legal and economic foundations, as well as the practical implications of the Commission's proposal for a new technology transfer block exemption regulation ("TTBER'') and associated Guidelines.

The article concludes that the new TTBER brings desirable flexibility to the assessment of the competitive effects of technology licensing agreements by abolishing the current division of the clauses into four categories of exempted, white, black and grey clauses. The Commission's proposal is also praised for extending the scope of the Regulation to software copyright licences and for exempting some efficiency-enhancing restrictions that currently fall outside of the TTBER. The …

The New Technology Transfer Block Exemption: Will The New Block Exemption Balance The Goals Of Innovation And Competition?, Maurits Dolmans, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

Licensors and licensees have long enjoyed the benefit of block exemption regulations for technology licensing. Block exemption regulations were adopted in the mid-80s for patent licensing and know-how licenses. These were combined and replaced in 1996 by a unified Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (TTBE). This block exemption is currently under review.

DG Competition is writing a draft for a new T'BE. It is expected to be ready for review by the member states in September, and to be published for comments in October. The Commission hopes to have the new block exemption adopted and published in the first quarter …

When Code Isn't Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court upheld extended copyright terms in Eldred v. Ascroft, many Internet activists called for renewed political action in the form of appeals to Congress or even a campaign to amend the Constitution. But others suggested a very different course: They argued that it would be wiser to forgo institutions controlled by the powers of the past, and to return instead to the keyboard to write the next generation of "lawbusting" code. In the words of one observer, "tech people are probably better off spending their energy writing code than being part of the political process" because …

Patents, Product Exclusivity, And Information Dissemination: How Law Directs Biopharmaceutical Research And Development, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Other Publications

It's a great honor for me to be invited to deliver the Levine Distinguished Lecture at Fordham, and a great opportunity to try out some new ideas before this audience. As some of you know, I've been studying the role of patents in biomedical research and product development ("R&D") for close to twenty years now, with a particular focus on how patents work in "upstream" research in universities and biotechnology companies that are working on research problems that arise prior to "downstream" product development. But, of course, the patent strategies of these institutions are designed around the profits that everyone …

Patent Thickets: Strategic Patenting Of Complex Technologies, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a product's technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build "thickets" of patents, especially incumbent firms in mature industries. When they assert these patents, innovators are forced to share rents under cross-licenses, making R&D incentives sub-optimal. On the other hand, when lead time advantages are significant and patent standards are high, firms pursue strategies of "mutual non-aggression." Then R&D incentives are stronger, even optimal.

Patentable Subject [Anti]Matter, Kristoffer Leftwich

Duke Law & Technology Review

The statements, "The laws of nature," "the principles of nature," "the fundamental truths," etc., are not patentable, have been oft repeated but seldom understandingly used. They have led to misunderstanding and much confusion, not limited to members of the bar. In fact, the words... are all words of broad and also elastic meaning and are frequently used carelessly and without any attempt at refined distinctions.

Technology Law, J. Douglas Cuthbertson, Glen L. Gross

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Belling The Cat, Virtually: Review Of Stuart Biegel's Beyond Our Control?, Shubha Ghosh

Buffalo Intellectual Property Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Festo: Blessing To Patent Holders Or Thorn In Their Sides?, Jennifer Miller

Duke Law & Technology Review

The Supreme Court makes another attempt to strike a balance between protecting an inventor's patent rights and ensuring adequate notice to the public of what constitutes patent infringement. This iBrief discusses the Supreme Court ruling in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd. and its foreseeable effects on the practice of patent law.

The Personal Information Protection And Electronic Documents Act: A Comprehensive Guide By William Charnetski, Patrick Flaherty And Jeremy Robinson (Toronto Canada Law Book Inc., 2001), Teresa Scassa

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act: A Comprehensive Guide (the Guide) is the second book to be published in English in Canada dealing expressly with the Personal Information Protec- tion and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The Guide is different from the earlier work, in that it is not a section by section discussion or annotation of the provisions of PIPEDA. Rather, it is organized into eight chapters, each addressing a distinct theme or topic. The Guide is also aimed at a more professional audience than the earlier work. In its introduction, and in its choice of content, it …