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Intellectual Property Law Commons™

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University of Michigan Law School

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Articles 181 - 210 of 595

Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law

Toward A Trips Truce, Patricia L. Judd Jul 2011

Toward A Trips Truce, Patricia L. Judd

Michigan Journal of International Law

The World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS or Agreement), now over fifteen years old, regulates a marketplace characterized by extraordinary dynamism, influenced by the constant forces of globalization and technological evolution. Attempts to regulate this market raise natural, persistent questions concerning the Agreement's ability to serve its respective constituencies and adapt to change. The Agreement operates in the midst of an age-old dynamic pitting developing and developed countries against one another, especially when it comes to domestic enforcement against piracy and counterfeiting-a dynamic in which TRIPS has been criticized as a one-sided instrument. …

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Breaking Patents, Daniel R. Cahoy Apr 2011

Breaking Patents, Daniel R. Cahoy

Michigan Journal of International Law

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Boeing aircraft company worked to address the rising cost of jet fuel by inventing lighter metal alloys for use in aerospace materials. Among its discoveries was a method of producing aluminum-lithium alloys with high "fracture toughness," and in 1989, Boeing received a patent for the process. Five years later, another aerospace company working as a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contractor, Lockheed Martin, was attempting to solve a similar problem related to materials used in the space shuttle. Lighter materials were necessary for future shuttle missions to transport components of the International Space …

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Innovative Copyright, Greg Lastowka Apr 2011

Innovative Copyright, Greg Lastowka

Michigan Law Review

For over a decade, Michael Carrier has been exploring the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property ("IP") law, contributing many articles that offer new solutions and approaches to the vexing problems confronting the law of innovation. Carrier's academic writing is situated in a voluminous scholarly discourse about the appropriate rules and goals of the laws of copyright, patent, and antitrust. While Carrier easily could have written an "insider" tome for specialists in this area, his new book, Innovation for the 21st Century, is targeted at a broader audience. Carrier's book is directed at legislators, jurists, and opinion makers-as well as …

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Public Non-Commercial Use' Compulsory Licensing For Pharmaceutical Drugs In Government Health Care Programs, Pier Deroo Feb 2011

Public Non-Commercial Use' Compulsory Licensing For Pharmaceutical Drugs In Government Health Care Programs, Pier Deroo

Michigan Journal of International Law

Suppose a relatively prosperous nation with universal public health coverage faces an HIV/AIDS crisis. It refuses to negotiate with the patent-holding manufacturers of the best antiretrovirals (ARVs) available, instead issuing compulsory licenses. Compulsory licenses permit the generic drug manufacturers designated in the compulsory licenses to make, use, import, and sell the patented ARVs without the permission of the patent owners, increasing competition and lowering prices. Realizing that drugs are much cheaper without patents, the nation decides to issue another round of compulsory licenses for an extensive list of patented drugs for its universal health care program. While improving public access …

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Databases And Dynamism, Michal Shur-Ofry Feb 2011

Databases And Dynamism, Michal Shur-Ofry

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Databases are generally perceived in legal scholarship as static warehouses, storing up valuable facts and information. Accordingly, scholarship on copyright protection of databases typically concentrates on the social need to access their content. This Article seeks to shift the focus of the debate, arguing that the copyrightdatabases debate is not merely a static "access to information" story. Instead, it is a dynamic story of relations, hierarchies, and interactions between pieces of information, determined by database creators. It is also a story of patterns, categories, selections, and taxonomies that are often invisible to the naked eye, but that influence our perceptions …

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Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation Settlements: Balancing Patent & Antitrust Policy Through Institutional Choice, Timothy A. Cook Jan 2011

Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation Settlements: Balancing Patent & Antitrust Policy Through Institutional Choice, Timothy A. Cook

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Should a branded pharmaceutical company be allowed to pay a generic competitor to stay out of the market for a drug? Antitrust policy implies that such a deal should be prohibited, but the answer becomes less clear when the transaction is packaged as a patent-litigation settlement. Since Congress passed the Hatch-Waxman Act, which encourages generic manufacturers to challenge pharmaceutical patent validity, settlements of this kind have been on the rise. Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission have condemned these agreements as anticompetitive and costly to American consumers, but none of these bodies has been able to …

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The People's Trade Secrets, David S. Levine Jan 2011

The People's Trade Secrets, David S. Levine

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The content of administered public school exams, modifications made by a government to its voting machines, and the business strategies of government corporations should be of interest to the public. At a minimum, they are the kinds of information that a government should allow its citizens to see and examine. After all, the public might have some legitimate questions for its government: Is that public school examination fair and accurate? Is that voting machine working so that my vote gets counted? To whom or what is that government agency marketing and are kickbacks involved? One would think that the government …

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Paper Tigers: Rethinking The Relationship Between Copyright And Scholarly Publishing, Alissa Centivany Jan 2011

Paper Tigers: Rethinking The Relationship Between Copyright And Scholarly Publishing, Alissa Centivany

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Discontent is growing in academia over the practices of the proprietary scholarly publishing industry. Scholars and universities criticize the expensive subscription fees, restrictive access policies, and copyright assignment requirements of many journals. These practices seem fundamentally unfair given that the industries' two main inputs-articles and peer-review-are provided to it free of charge. Furthermore, while many publishers continue to enjoy substantial profit margins, many elite university libraries have been forced to triage their collections, choosing between purchasing monographs or subscribing to journals, or in some cases, doing away with "non-essential" materials altogether. The situation is even more dire for non-elite schools, …

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Hatch-Waxmanizing Copyright, Michal Shur-Ofry Jan 2011

Hatch-Waxmanizing Copyright, Michal Shur-Ofry

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Essay presents a novel proposal for counter balancing "copyright overspills." In the background of the discussion is the common reality of users succumbing to rights holders' attempts to license uses which are most likely fair uses or completely free of copyright protection. These practices have attracted considerable attention in recent literature. Most scholarly proposals in this context emphasize the need to clarify the contours of the fair use doctrine and to remove doctrinal ambiguities. Yet these initiatives are probably insufficient to overcome users' risk aversion in copyright markets due to an inherent structural imbalance within copyright law. While the …

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The Endowment Effect In Ip Transactions: The Case Against Debiasing, Ofer Tur-Sinai Jan 2011

The Endowment Effect In Ip Transactions: The Case Against Debiasing, Ofer Tur-Sinai

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Article contains a critical discussion of recent studies by Christopher Buccafusco and Christopher Sprigman concerning the role of the endowment effect in intellectual property transactions. According to the thesis presented in these studies, the existence of an endowment effect in the markets for IP goods causes inefficiencies. In order to counteract such inefficiencies, the authors argue, IP rights must be weakened in various ways, including shifting toward liability rules, adding formalities in copyright law, and expanding the fair use doctrine. The thesis as presented is groundbreaking and would have broad implications. This Article, however, points out several shortcomings of …

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Teva V. Eisai: What's The Real Controversy, Grace Wang Jan 2011

Teva V. Eisai: What's The Real Controversy, Grace Wang

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Note examines the changing role of declaratory judgment actions in challenging patents upon generic entry and evaluates alternative regulatory schemes to the FDA's current system of patent enforcement in the drug approval setting. Part I reviews the Federal Circuit's recent decisions regarding generic drug entry, focusing on how the courts justify declaratory judgments in the current system and when a "controversy" exists to create Article III jurisdiction. Part II examines the complex system of regulating generic drug entry and how attempts to stop the exploitation of loopholes have resulted in a patchwork of regulation by various parties. It challenges …

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Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2011

Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …

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Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2011

Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Recent commentators have observed, and sometimes lamented, significant gaps between the formal reach of the patent system and the practical exclusionary effect of patent law. It is costly for technology developers to obtain and assert patents, for technology users to identify the patents they might be infringing and to clear rights, and for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to find patent-defeating prior art. The costs of the patent system provide shelter for infringing behavior that might otherwise lead to either licensing or liability, perhaps mitigating excesses in the patent system while retaining strong rights that motivated owners may enforce. …

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Owning Mark(Et)S, Mark A. Lemley, Mark P. Mckenna Nov 2010

Owning Mark(Et)S, Mark A. Lemley, Mark P. Mckenna

Michigan Law Review

Trademark owners regularly rely on claims that the defendant is "free riding" on their mark by making money using that mark, money the trademark owners say should belong to them. We analyze those free-riding claims and find them wanting. The empirical data shows that defendants in unrelated markets can benefit from using a well-known mark, but that neither mark owners nor consumers suffer any injury from that use. A legal claim that a defendant is unjustly benefiting by using a plaintiff's mark is hollow unless it is accompanied by a theory of why that benefit should rightly belong to the …

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Protecting Nominative Fair Use, Parody, And Other Speech-Interests By Reforming The Inconsistent Exemptions From Trademark Liability, Samuel M. Duncan Oct 2010

Protecting Nominative Fair Use, Parody, And Other Speech-Interests By Reforming The Inconsistent Exemptions From Trademark Liability, Samuel M. Duncan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Federal trademark law exempts certain communicative uses of a trademark from liability so that the public can freely use a trademark to comment on the markowner or to describe its products. These exemptions for "speech-interests" are badly flawed because their scope is inconsistent between infringement and dilution law, and because the cost and difficulty of claiming their protection varies significantly from court to court. Many speech-interests remain vulnerable to the chilling threat of litigation even though they are "protected" by current law. This Note proposes a simple statutory reform that will remedy this inconsistency by creating an express safe harbor …

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Insterstitial Exclusivities After Association For Molecular Pathology, Mary Mitchell, Dana A. Remus Sep 2010

Insterstitial Exclusivities After Association For Molecular Pathology, Mary Mitchell, Dana A. Remus

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The high profile cases Bilski v. Kappos and Association for Molecular Pathology v. United States Patent and Trademark Office have renewed public debate about the proper scope of patentable subject matter. The subject matter inquiry has traditionally been treated as a threshold inquiry in patent law, serving a gate-keeping function by defining the types of inventions that are eligible for patent protection. The Patent Office and courts have approached the subject matter inquiry both by determining whether an invention falls into a statutory category-processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions of matter-as well as by determining whether an invention falls into a …

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Costs, Norms, And Inertia: Avoiding An Anticommons For Proprietary Research Tools, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Apr 2010

Costs, Norms, And Inertia: Avoiding An Anticommons For Proprietary Research Tools, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

A decade ago the scientific community was sounding alann bells about the impact of intellectual property on the ability of scientists to do their work. Protracted negotiations over access to patented mice and genes, scientific databases, and tangible research materials all pointed toward the same conclusion: that intellectual property claims were undennining traditional sharing norms to the detriment of science. Michael Heller and I highlighted one dimension of this concern: that too many intellectual property rights in 'upstream' research results could paradoxically restrict 'downstream' research and product development by making it too costly and burdensome to collect all the necessary …

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The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh Apr 2010

The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh

Michigan Law Review

People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same. But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference …

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Fixing Patent Boundaries, Tun-Jen Chiang Feb 2010

Fixing Patent Boundaries, Tun-Jen Chiang

Michigan Law Review

The claims of a patent are its boundaries, defining the scope of exclusion. This boundary function of claims is undermined by the fact that claims can be changed throughout the life of the patent, thereby moving the patent boundary. A boundary that can be moved at-will is one that the public cannot rely upon. This Article explores the problems of malleable patent boundaries. If a claim can be amended to permit a patentee to capture something he did not foresee when filing the patent application, the amendment confers an unexpected windfall that did not contribute to incentives to invent before …

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In Search Of (Maintaining) The Truth: The Use Of Copyright Law By Religious Organizations, David A. Simon Jan 2010

In Search Of (Maintaining) The Truth: The Use Of Copyright Law By Religious Organizations, David A. Simon

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The goal of this Article is to do what others have not: determine whether religious organizations should use copyright law to advance their goals of censorship and doctrinal purity. Answering this question entails a two-step analysis. First, the religious motivations must be compared with the underlying theories of, or justifications for, copyright law. Whether those principles align or conflict with religious motivations will inform our normative answer. Regardless of the answer to the aforementioned inquiry, the second step analyzes whether substantive copyright law doctrine facilitates or impedes the achievement of the ends advanced by these religious motivations. As a result …

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Pioneers Versus Improvers: Enabling Optimal Patent Claim Scope, Timothy Chen Saulsbury Jan 2010

Pioneers Versus Improvers: Enabling Optimal Patent Claim Scope, Timothy Chen Saulsbury

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Arising most commonly as a defense to an infringement claim, enablement requires a patent to describe the claimed invention in sufficient detail to permit a person having ordinary skill in the relevant field to replicate and use the invention without needing to engage in "undue experimentation." If a patent claim is not "enabled"--i.e., if a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) who studied the patent cannot make or use the invention without undue experimentation--the claim is invalid and can no longer be asserted. This penalty deters patent applicants from claiming more than they invented and allows others to …

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It Is Time: Why The Fda Should Start Disclosing Drug Trial Data, Mustafa Ünlü Jan 2010

It Is Time: Why The Fda Should Start Disclosing Drug Trial Data, Mustafa Ünlü

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Although [drug] manufacturers bear the cost of research data generation, it is oftentimes a worthwhile investment that also confers significant commercial advantages. Consequently, they have argued that research data should be considered a trade secret and kept confidential. The FDA's longstanding position has been to accept this proposition. Even when Congress appeared to mandate disclosure or weaken the underlying rationale for secrecy, the FDA has continued to treat research data as confidential. A strong argument against a default posture of confidentiality is that research data disclosure would promote broad public interests by eliminating the societal costs brought about by keeping …

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Optimal Fines For False Patent Marking, Thomas F. Cotter Jan 2010

Optimal Fines For False Patent Marking, Thomas F. Cotter

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Essay proposes that, in order to avoid imposing arbitrary (and perhaps unnecessarily large) fines for false patent marking, courts should seek guidance in the law of remedies for false advertising and copyright infringement. In particular, courts should attempt to approximate the social harm caused by actionable false marking by taking into account (1) the plaintiff's loss (if any) and the defendant's gain (if any) attributable to the false marking at issue; (2) the plausibility of substantial but less easily quantifiable harms to consumers and to nonparty competitors; and (3) the risks, on the one hand, of underdeterring statutory violations …

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Patenting By Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Study, Ted Sichelman, Stuart J.H. Graham Jan 2010

Patenting By Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Study, Ted Sichelman, Stuart J.H. Graham

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

[T]he Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation--an organization that studies and promotes entrepreneurship in the United States--funded an effort at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, to undertake the first comprehensive survey of the relationship between patenting and entrepreneurship in the United States. The authors, along with other investigators, administered the survey in 2008 to approximately 15,000 startup and early-stage companies in the biotechnology, medical device, information technology (IT) hardware, and software and Internet sectors. A portion of the survey examined why entrepreneurs, startups, and early-stage companies do (and do not) seek patents. This Article reports and analyzes results from …

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Media-Rich Input Application Liability, David R. Krohn, Pekarek Jan 2010

Media-Rich Input Application Liability, David R. Krohn, Pekarek

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Until recently, media-rich online interactions were mostly unidirectional: multimedia content was delivered by the service provider to the user. Input from the user came almost exclusively in the form of text. Even when searching the Internet for images or audio, a user typically entered text into a search engine. In addition, search engines indexed multimedia content by analyzing not the content itself but the text surrounding it. This is rapidly changing. With the rise of multimedia-capable smartphones and wireless broadband, applications that allow users to search using non-textual inputs are quickly becoming popular. These applications go much further than simply …

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Not So Technical: An Analysis Of Federal Circuit Patent Decisions Appealed From The Itc, Holly Lance Jan 2010

Not So Technical: An Analysis Of Federal Circuit Patent Decisions Appealed From The Itc, Holly Lance

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

A widespread perception among the patent law community is that the patent system would be more effective if judges with technical backgrounds and patent law experience decided patent disputes. Proponents believe that if judges all had similar baseline knowledge of technological analysis, there would be more consistency in decision-making, leading to more predictability for parties. Some district courts have unofficially become semi-specialized in patent law disputes, and Congress is debating whether to institute a more formalized Patent Pilot Program in which district court judges specialize in patent law cases. This Note joins the debate and examines patent law cases at …

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How Many Patents Does It Take To Make A Drug - Follow-On Pharmaceutical Patents And University Licensing, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette Jan 2010

How Many Patents Does It Take To Make A Drug - Follow-On Pharmaceutical Patents And University Licensing, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

As described by Professors Dan Burk and Mark Lemley, drugs are[...] special because of the low number of patents per product: "In some industries, such as chemistry and pharmaceuticals, a single patent normally covers a single product. Much conventional wisdom in the patent system is built on the unstated assumption of such a one-to-one correspondence." Although many have repeated this one-patent, one-drug assumption, there has been little empirical analysis of how many patents actually protect each drug. In fact, most small-molecule drugs are protected by multiple patents. The average was nearly 3.5 patents per drug in 2005, with over five …

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The Copyright Principles Project: Directions For Reform, Jessica D. Litman, Pamela Samuelson, The Copyright Principles Project Jan 2010

The Copyright Principles Project: Directions For Reform, Jessica D. Litman, Pamela Samuelson, The Copyright Principles Project

Articles

Copyright law performs a number of important functions. It facilitates public access to knowledge and a wide range of uses of creative works of authorship, and, in so doing, it helps educate our populace, enrich our culture, and promote free speech, free expression, and democratic values. It provides opportunities for rights holders to recoup investments in creating and disseminating their works and to enjoy the fruits of whatever success arises from the public's uses of their works. In the process, copyright also plays a role in regulating new technologies and services through which creative works may be accessed. A well-functioning …

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The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2010

The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

This Article explores playwrights' common law "play right." Since this conference celebrates the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I begin in England in the 17th Century. I find no trace of a common law playwright's performance right in either the law or the customary practices surrounding 17th and 18th century English theatre. I argue that the nature and degree of royal supervision of theatre companies and performance during the period presented no occasion (and, indeed, left no opportunity) for such a right to arise. I discuss the impetus for Parliament's enactment of a performance right statute in 1833, …

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Real Copyright Reform, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2010

Real Copyright Reform, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

A copyright system is designed to produce an ecology that nurtures the creation, dissemination, and enjoyment of works of authorship. When it works well, it encourages creators to generate new works, assists intermediaries in disseminating them widely, and supports readers, listeners, and viewers in enjoying them. If the system poses difficult entry barriers to creators, imposes demanding impediments on intermediaries, or inflicts burdensome conditions and hurdles on readers, then the system fails to achieve at least some of its purposes. The current U.S. copyright statute is flawed in all three respects. In this Article, I explore how the current copyright …

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