Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Disability And Design, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

When scholars contemplate the legal tools available to policymakers for encouraging innovation, they primarily think about patents. If they are keeping up with the most recent literature, they may also consider grants, prizes, and taxes as means to increase the supply of innovation. But the innovation policy toolkit is substantially deeper than that. To demonstrate its depth, this Article explores the evolution of designs that help people with disabilities access the world around them. From artificial limbs to the modern wheelchair and the reshaping of the built environment, a variety of legal doctrines have influenced, for better and for worse, …

How Conceptual Art Challenges Copyright's Notions Of Authorial Control And Creativity, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Trump Administration’S Social Security Rules Will Harm Innovation In The Assistive Technology Industry And People With Disabilities, Christopher Buccafusco, Mariel Talmage

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Do Patent Law Suits Target Invalid Patents?, Michael Frakes, Melissa F. Wasserman

Faculty Scholarship

One objective of the patent litigation system is to screen meritorious from non-meritorious patents and invalidate the latter. While much of this screening may occur at trial, some amount of targeting may take place at the time of the filing of the suit itself. In this chapter, we assess the targeting efficiency of the patent litigation system at this earlier filing stage. Should the system indeed screen at this stage, one would predict a higher likelihood of patent lawsuits among a set of patents with weaker underlying validity relative to a set of patents with stronger underlying validity. In prior …

Accountability, Secrecy, And Innovation In Ai-Enabled Clinical Decision Software, Arti K. Rai, Isha Sharma, Christina Silcox

Faculty Scholarship

This article employs analytical and empirical tools to dissect the complex relationship between secrecy, accountability, and innovation incentives in clinical decision software enabled by machine learning (ML-CD). Although secrecy can provide incentives for innovation, it can also diminish the ability of third parties to adjudicate risk and benefit responsibly. Our first aim is descriptive. We address how the interrelated regimes of intellectual property law, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, and tort liability are currently shaping information flow and innovation incentives. We find that developers regard secrecy over training data and details of the trained model as central to competitive …

Copyright And The 1%, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

No one ever argues for copyright on the grounds that superstar artists and authors need more money, but what if that is all, or mostly all, that copyright does? This article presents newly available data on the distribution of players across the PC videogame market. This data reveals an L-shaped distribution of demand. A relative handful of games are extremely popular. The vast majority are not. In the face of an L curve, copyright overpays superstars, but does very little for the average author and for works at the margins of profitability. This makes copyright difficult to justify on either …

Geographical Indications Of Origin, Economic Development, And Cultural Heritage: Good Match Or Mismatch?, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I propose that geographical indications (GIs) carry important economic benefits. First, GIs are essential instruments to facilitate investments in high-quality products and niche markets, and promote local trade and development. Second, GIs offer an additional layer of information for consumers about the geographical origin and quality of the products they identify, in turn reducing the information asymmetries between producers and consumers. Third, because of this information function, GIs can assist in rewarding or holding producers accountable for their products based on the additional information they convey to the market. Yet, GIs can also protect culture-related interests and …

The U.S. Posture On Global Access To Medication & The Case For Change, Michael Palmedo, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of including intellectual property rights within the larger agenda of trade. While the marriage between trade and intellectual property was always uncomfortable, COVID-19 exposed the flaws, failures and the inadequacy of the trade agenda to harmonise intellectual property rights, particularly for patents in pharmaceuticals. Typically, the United States through its questionable United States Trade Representative (USTR) process exposed the vulnerabilities of the intellectual property systems of the rest of the world. COVID-19 exposed the manner in which the so-called ‘superior’ intellectual property regime of the US left the country with a weak health-care …

Prophetic Patents, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

In most contexts, making up data is forbidden - considered fraudulent or even immoral. Not so in patents. Patents often contain experimental data and it is perfectly acceptable for these experiments to be entirely fictional. These so-called "prophetic examples" are not only explicitly permitted by both the Patent and Trademark Office and federal courts, but are considered almost equivalent to factual data in patent doctrine. Though prophetic examples are thought to be common, there are no studies of these experiments, no explanation for why fictional data are allowed in patents, and no evaluation of the practice.

Here, I provide the …

Death Of Copyright, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

The four primary bodies of intellectual property law—patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and the law of trade secrets—address the question of duration in different ways. Trade secrets have no fixed duration; the law protects against misappropriation as long as the relevant information remains secret. Trademark protection lasts as long as the mark retains its capacity to distinguish the goods or services it is attached to. In patent law—my primary area of scholarship—duration is fixed, finite, and generally straightforward to determine: you get twenty years from the date you file your patent application. Copyright duration, by contrast, varies depending on …

A Natural Right To Copy, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium, we gather to celebrate the work of Wendy Gordon. In this essay, I revisit her article, A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property. In the article, Professor Gordon first used the "no-harm" principle of John Locke to justify copyright as natural right and then used his “enough-and-as-good” proviso to limit that right. Her second step turned natural rights approaches to copyright on its head. Through it, she showed that even if we accept copyright as natural right, that acceptance does not necessarily lead to a copyright of undue breadth …

Right Of Repair In The Digital Economy, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

We have long understood that people have a right to repair what they own, but this right to repair is under siege. A new article by Leah Chan Grinvald and Ofer Tur-Sinai explains how IP rules are inhibiting these repair rights and why laws protecting the right to repair are necessary and justifiable. As I explain below, authors Grinvald and Tur-Sinai describe the growing right to repair movement pushing for legislation to protect the right to repair and show how intellectual property laws should facilitate not interfere with consumers rights to repair what they own. The authors also propose a …

Letter To Council Members Regarding Council Draft 3, Jane C. Ginsburg, June M. Besek

Faculty Scholarship

We understand that the ALI Council will consider Council Draft 3 (CD3) of the Restatement of the Law, Copyright (Copyright Restatement) project at its meeting on October 17-18, 2019. The Council may not appreciate how controversial a project this is: the U.S. Copyright Office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the American Bar Association’s Section of Intellectual Property Law, the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Copyright and Literary Property, academics and other Advisers and Liaisons have expressed serious concerns about this and previous Council Drafts and Preliminary Drafts; indeed, the Register of Copyrights deplored the project as a …

Disguised Patent Policymaking, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

Patent Office power has grown immensely in this decade, and the agency is wielding its power in predictably troubling ways. Like other agencies, it injects politics into its decisions while relying on technocratic justifications. It also reads grants of authority expansively to aggrandize its power, especially to the detriment of judicial checks on agency action. However, this story of Patent Office ascendancy differs from that of other agencies in two important respects. One is that the U.S. patent system still remains primarily a means for allocating property rights, not a comprehensive regime of industrial regulation. Thus, the Patent Office cannot …

A Tale Of Two Copyrights, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores two possible copyright regimes. The first uses costless and perfect price discrimination to enable copyright owners to capture the full market or exchange value of their work. The second also uses costless and perfect price discrimination, but allows copyright owners to capture only the persuasion cost for authoring and distributing a work. We can call the first regime, costless copyright maximalism, and the second, costless copyright minimalism. The choice between these two regimes is primarily distributional: Should we design copyright to allocate the surplus associated with copyrighted works to copyright owners or to copyright consumers? This essay …

United States Response To Questionnaire Concerning Managing Copyright, June M. Besek, Jane C. Ginsburg, Philippa Loengard, Ralph Peer

Faculty Scholarship

ALAI-USA is the U.S. branch of ALAI (Association Littèraire et Artistique Internationale). ALAI-USA was started in the 1980's by the late Professor Melville B. Nimmer, and was later expanded by Professor John M. Kernochan.

Elite Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last twenty years, one of the most significant developments in intellectual property law has been the dramatic increase in the number of patent cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. That same time period has also seen the emergence of a small, elite group of lawyers specializing not in any particular area of substantive law but in litigation before the Supreme Court. In recent empirical work, I linked the Court’s growing interest in patent law to the more frequent participation of elite Supreme Court lawyers in patent cases, particularly at the cert. stage. Among other things, I found …

Renewed Efficiency In Administrative Patent Revocation, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

Administrative patent revocation in the U.S. is poised to enter a new period of efficiency, though ironically it will be an efficiency that the America Invents Act originally put in place. The Court’s recent approval of the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Appeal Board ("PTAB") proceedings was blunted by the Court’s accompanying rejection of partial institution. This Patent Office practice of accepting and denying validity review petitions piecemeal had been a key part of the agency’s procedural structure from the start. As a result, the Court’s decision in SAS Institute v. Iancu to require a binary choice — either fully …

The Mixed Case For A Ptab Off-Ramp, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins from the emerging agenda in the political branches for reforming various aspects of the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and focuses on a particular reform: the creation of a PTAB off-ramp whereby a patent being challenged in an administrative revocation proceeding could be removed into a system primarily aimed at amending its claims and preserving its validity. To put the proposal into perspective, the Essay presents specific empirical trends, largely unexplored until now, that implicate patent reliance interests to which the PTAB has done injury. Ultimately, because the benefits and costs from a PTAB off-ramp are …

Building Intellectual Property Infrastructure Along China’S Belt And Road, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, China has played pivotal roles in developing initiatives such as the BRICS Summit, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China has also negotiated a number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements, connecting the country to markets in Asia, Australasia, Europe, South America and other parts of the world. Many of these agreements include provisions or chapters on intellectual property protection and enforcement.

One new initiative that has not received much scholarly and policy attention from intellectual property commentators concerns the slowly emerging "One Belt, One Road" …

Intellectual Property And Human Rights 2.0, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Written in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this article calls for greater methodological engagement to refine existing human rights approaches to intellectual property and to devise new approaches to advance the promotion and protection of human rights in the intellectual property area.

This article begins by briefly recapturing the past two decades of scholarship on intellectual property and human rights. It documents the progress scholars have made in this intersectional area. The article then draws on the latest research on human rights methods and methodology to explore whether and how we can take …

The Asean Way Or No Way? A Closer Look At The Absence Of A Common Rule On Intellectual Property Exhaustion In Asean And The Impact On The Asean Market, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

The Symposium in which this essay is published features recent developments in the law of intellectual property (IP) in Asia. In this essay, I focus on the Association of South East-Asian Nations (ASEAN), a region that I have had the opportunity to visit extensively in the past several years. In particular, I analyze the enforcement of IP rights in the context of the application of the principle of IP exhaustion in individual ASEAN Members, and the relationship between this principle and free movement of goods within the ASEAN region. In the past, I have addressed the same topic with respect …

Spill-Over Reputation: Comparative Study Of India & The United States, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper compares India’s position with that of the US on the question of protection of well-known marks in the light of applicable international legal prescriptions. The discussion in this paper compares protection for famous foreign marks (as opposed to a famous mark). Famous foreign marks are those that have acquired fame in one country and hence, well-known in another country.

Data Producer's Right And The Protection Of Machine-Generated Data, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In October 2017, the European Commission advanced a proposal for the creation of a new data producer's right for non-personal, anonymized machine-generated data. Driven in large part by the automotive industry, this proposal has thus far attracted considerable criticisms. While commentators have questioned whether the proposed right is needed in the first place, the EU proposal has also generated more questions than answers.

Written for a special issue on the "Legal Implications of the Platform Economy," this essay begins by revisiting the debate on sui generis database protection in both the Europe Union and the United States. It then discusses …

Fair Use And Its Global Paradigm Evolution, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This Article closely examines the transplant of the fair use model in US. copyright law on to foreign soil. It begins by reviewing the literature concerning paradigm shift, in particular Thomas Kuhn's seminal work. The Article then documents a growing trend toward the worldwide adoption of the U.S. fair use model and a countertrend toward the retention of the status quo. The juxtaposition of these two trends explain why jurisdictions that set out to transplant U.S. -style fair use ended up adopting a hybrid model. The second half of this Article interrogates the different primary causes behind such a paradigm …

Comments On Preliminary Draft 4 [Black Letter And Comments], Jane C. Ginsburg, June M. Besek

Faculty Scholarship

In many respects, PD4 is a helpful synthesis of the law, likely to provoke less controversy than drafts of earlier Chapters. Nevertheless, we remain concerned about this draft’s, like its predecessors’, inconsistent treatment of legal issues. As in earlier drafts, this one sometimes traverses the line between restating positive law and “improving” it. In several instances, these departures from positive law adopt policy positions we would endorse in a different kind of endeavor, such as a “Principles” project, or an acknowledged advocacy piece. But we do not believe it accurate to characterize these departures, however substantively desirable, as “restating” the …

Data Exclusivities And The Limits To Trips Harmonization, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

2019 marks the silver anniversary of the WTO TRIPS Agreement. Policymakers and commentators remain deeply divided about the strengths and limitations of this agreement. On the one hand, they marvel at its success in establishing international minimum standards for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. On the other hand, they widely criticize the agreement for imposing high "one size fits all" standards upon developing countries.

Regardless of one's perspective, the harmonization project advanced by the TRIPS Agreement, and continued through TRIPS-plus bilateral, regional and plurilateral agreements, has been at the forefront of the international intellectual property debate. While …

A Hater's Guide To Geoblocking, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Geoblocking restricts access to online content based on the user's geographical location. Territorially based access control is strongly disliked, if not passionately hated, by those who travel abroad frequently as well as those who consume a considerable amount of foreign content. While the past has seen the use of geoblocking as technological self-help, such a technique has now received growing support from policymakers and judges.

Commissioned for a symposium on "Intellectual Property in a Globalized Economy: United States Extraterritoriality in International Business," this article begins by briefly recounting five sets of arguments against geoblocking. The article then draws on the …

The Non-Doctrine Of Redundancy, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores and evaluates a controversial practice that the Patent Office undertook beginning early in the post-AIA regime, the practice of denying otherwise meritorious requests for review because of what the Office termed "redundant" grounds. The controversy over redundancy-based rejections had several sources. One was that making such rejections required the Patent Office to decide petitions piecemeal—and, indeed, the agency claimed that power for itself—even though it was not clear that this power lay within the statute. Another source was that the Patent Office persistently declined to explain what, in the agency's view, did or did not constitute redundancy. …

The Procedure Of Patent Eligibility, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

A decade ago, the patent-eligible subject matter requirement was defunct. Several recent Supreme Court decisions, however, have made eligibility the most important issue in many patent cases. To date, debates over the resurgent doctrine have focused mainly on its substance. Critics contend that the Supreme Court’s case law makes patents too easy to invalidate and discourages innovation. Supporters emphasize that the Court’s decisions help eradicate the overly broad patents often asserted by so-called patent trolls.

Yet one important consequence of eligibility’s revival has been procedural. Because district courts often view eligibility to present a pure question of law, they are—for …