Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

A Technological Contribution Requirement For Patentable Subject Matter: Supreme Court Precedent And Policy, David J. Kappos, John R. Thomas, Randall J. Bluestone

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

The Enablement Pendulum Swings Back, Sean B. Seymore

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

The Pendulum Swings Back: The Impact Of Recent Scotus And Federal Circuit Cases, Troy A. Groetken, Timothy R. Holbrook, Sean Seymore, Donald L. Zuhn, Jr.

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Enablement Issues Concerning Aggressively Broad Generic Claims, J. Benjamin Bai

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Meh. The Irrelevance Of Copyright In The Public Mind, Brett Lunceford, Shane Lunceford

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Should Only Technical Inventions Be Patentable, Following The European Example?, Reinier B. Bakels

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Legal Turbulence After : New Possibilities For Patent Licensing At Research Institutions, Jonathan Hillel

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

The Public Domain: Enclosing The Commons Of The Mind, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

Our music, our culture, our science and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In his award-winning book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, …

The Other Famous Marks Doctrine, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Debates on protection for famous trademarks often center around state and federal antidilution laws. Both the old Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 and the new Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006 have generated many law review articles and numerous symposia. The dilution law focuses on trademarks deemed famous within U.S. boundaries. A debate on protection for famous trademarks today is incomplete without a discussion of the other famous marks doctrine. The other famous marks doctrine recognizes marks famous in other countries without actual use in the country where a user adopts the trademark on similar goods and services.

In …

Justice Scalia’S “Renegade Jurisdiction”: Lessons For Patent Law Reform, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Justice Scalia called the Eastern District of Texas ("EDTX") the "renegade jurisdiction." Critics label it the "rocket-docket" for patents. All blame it on the ills of patent litigation, demanding for national reform. This Article challenges the prevailing myths with an empirical quantitative study of more than 27,000 patent cases filed in the last decade and a qualitative study on patent forum shopping. This Article contends that the proposed venue reforms will not prevent litigants from shopping for a favorable forum in which to resolve patent litigations. This Article suggests that instead of the quick fixes vis-à-vis proposed venue reform legislation …

Selling It First, Stealing It Later: The Trouble With Trademarks In Corporate Transactions In Bankruptcy, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Why does AI get two bites of the “Apple” trademark? Should AI be allowed to grant the right to use the trademark “perpetual and exclusive” with the sale of the music division and steal it back for free, ten years later? This article is part of an ongoing and broader inquiry into the intersection of trademark, contract and bankruptcy laws. This article argues that recent bankruptcy decisional law, notably the In re Exide Technologies decision, misunderstands the “perpetual and exclusive” trademark transaction, deeming it as an ordinary “license” when it is truly an outright sale. This article explains that the …

The Dangers Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Much Ado About Nothing?, Steve P. Calandrillo, Ewa A. Davison

Articles

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at protecting copyright holders from those who might manufacture or traffic technology capable of allowing users to evade piracy protections on the underlying work. At its core, the DMCA flatly prohibits the circumvention of “technological protection measures” in order to gain access to copyrighted works, but provides no safety valve for any traditionally protected uses.

While hailed as a victory by the software and entertainment industries, the academic and scientific communities ties have been far less enthusiastic. The DMCA’s goal of combating piracy is …

Google And Fair Use, Jonathan Band

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Rescuecom Corp. V. Google, Inc.: A Misuse Of The Federal Trademark Doctrine Of Commercial Use, Jeffrey S. Fabian

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Is Fame All There Is? - Beating Global Monopolists At Their Own Marketing Game, 40 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 123 (2008), Doris E. Long

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In the global economy of the twenty-first century, "coca-colanization" has become a painful economic reality for developing nations. With new branding strategies and a legal protection regime that favors the famous marks of global monopolists, local businesses are not only losing market share, they are also losing their ability to compete in a new environment where leveraged marks often have little relevance to the actual value of the products or services for local consumers. To counter these trends, and add rationality to the global trademark regime, developing countries must develop new strategies and a conscious policy that not only values …

Crossing The Innovation Divide, 81 Temp. L. Rev. 507 (2008), Doris E. Long

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

While intellectual property has long been perceived as a method for protecting, and ultimately valuing, innovation, it is an imperfect measure. With its traditional bias in favor of innovation as delimited by Western views of individuality and technological progress, intellectual property is not only an imperfect measure, but also one that has contributed to the undervaluing of non- Western innovation and creativity. This undervaluation has denied developing and least-developed countries a right of compensation for local innovation, which has contributed to the continuing imbalance in economic development. Recognizing a broader definition of compensable innovation that includes non-Western concepts, including innovation …

Raising The Dead: How The Ninth Circuit Avoided The Supreme Court's Guidelines Concerning Aesthetic Functionality And Still Got Away With It In Au-Tomotive Gold, Yevgeniy Markov

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Massively Multiplayer Online Fraud: Why The Introduction Of Real World Law In A Virtual Context Is Good For Everyone, Ethan E. White

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Glannon Guide To Property: Learning Property Through Multiple-Choice Questions And Analysis, James C. Smith

Books

Reproduced with the permission of Aspen Publishers from Smith, James Charles. 2008. The Glannon Guide to Property: Learning Property through Multiple-choice Questions and Analysis. Austin: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business/Aspen Publishers.

Google's New Monopoly? How The Company Could Gain By Paying Millions In Copyright Fees, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Last week, Google settled a controversial copyright case by agreeing to pay tens of millions in licensing fees to authors and publishers, with more to come. At first glance, it looks like this great champion of the free flow of information has caved to copyright interests. But in fact, Google may be better off with a settlement than an outright win. Before the court approves this agreement, then, it must consider the deal's anti-competitive effects. [..]

Rethinking Copyright: Property Through The Lenses Of Unjust Enrichment And Unfair Competition, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

For some time now, scholars have come to recognize the existence of numerous structural infirmities deeply embedded within the modern copyright system. Most of these infirmities have been attributed to internal tensions within copyright law and policy, including the competing philosophies of access and control, use and exclusion, and rights and exceptions. Professor Stadler’s insightful article documents these tensions and proposes a new way of mediating them. She argues that copyright law is best understood as instantiating a restriction
on unfair competition and, consequently, that it should do little more than protect creators of original works from “competitive harm” in …

Recent Developments In Us Copyright Law – Part Ii, Caselaw: Exclusive Rights On The Ebb?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The 1976 Act announces broad exclusive rights, offset by a myriad of specific exemptions, and one wide exception for "fair use." In words and intent, the exclusive rights are capacious, but new technologies may have caused some of the general phrases to become more constraining than might have been expected from a text whose drafters took pains to make forward-looking. Thus, the scope of the reproduction right turns on the meaning of "copy;" the reach of the distribution right on "distribute copies" and "transfer of ownership;" the range of the public performance right on "public" and "perform." Entrepreneurs and users …

Perfect 10 V. Visa: The Future Of Contributory Copyright Infringement, James M. Tilly

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Billowing White Goo, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The title of this symposium is the question: "Fair Use: "Incredibly Shrinking" or Extraordinarily Expanding?" I'd argue that the answer to the question is "no." Fair use isn't doing either. The size of the fair use footprint has stayed remarkably constant over the past 30 or even 50 years. What has expanded, extraordinarily, is the size of rights granted by the copyright law. It may seem as if fair use is either expanding or shrinking, because the greater reach of copyright has made a bunch of uses potentially fair that weren't even potentially infringing 50 years ago. In order to …

Tearing Fashion Design Protection Apart At The Seams, Lisa J. Hedrick

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Identifying And Keeping The Genie In The Bottle: The Practical And Legal Realities Of Trade Secrets In Bankruptcy Proceedings, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

Anyone who has been paid attention to developments in the world of business over the past quarter century can attest to the fact that intellectual property (IP) is a hot commodity. Indeed, in contrast to the companies that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution, the companies that have spawned as part of the so-called “Information Age” attribute much of their value and future prospects to intangible, rather than tangible, assets. Unfortunately, while bankruptcy courts have generally recognized the need to distinguish between tangible and intangible assets, particularly when determining whether a claim is secured or unsecured, they often fail to …

Trademarks And The Beijing Olympics: Gold Medal Challenges, 7 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 433 (2008), Doris E. Long

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

There is no question that the Summer Olympics in Beijing pose a tremendous marketing opportunity. They also pose a great opportunity for the development of effective techniques for enforcing intellectual property rights. China has already enacted special regulations governing the protection of Olympic symbols and has established special regulations governing the enforcement of those regulations. Yet many of the cultural and political issues that impact China’s enforcement activities in other arenas (including counterfeiting and piracy of IP protected goods and services) remain problematic. Furthermore, while the Olympic symbols may be the subject of heightened protection, cultural perceptions of the differences …

Virtual China, 7 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 469 (2008), Steven Hetcher

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Although the Chinese government has devoted significant resources to censoring the online activities of its citizens, it may soon be facing a new challenge. Virtual-world computer games in which player controlled personas interact in cyberspace are growing in both sophistication and popularity. In such games, the very actions of the characters may represent banned themes which unfold in real time. These lucrative games do not lend themselves to the traditional text-based censorship techniques and site blocking may not be feasible for economic reasons. A deeper understanding of the threat virtual-world gaming represents to Chinese censorship efforts can be gained by …

Striking The "Rights" Balance Among Private Private Incentives And Public Fair Uses In The United States And China, 7 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 488 (2008), Llewellyn Joseph Gibbons, Xiao Li Wang

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Any economically efficient intellectual property rights system must contain a balance between the required creativity and innovation needed to obtain the intellectual property rights and the economic investment needed to obtain that level of creativity. Most intellectual property rights systems are uniform across all industries. However, this results in inefficiencies in certain industries that may need more or less intellectual property rights protection than others. Governments that attempt to correct the inefficiencies can create long-term consequences in the quality or quantity of new creative works. On one hand, granting more intellectual property rights to certain industries may result in spoilage …

The Controversy Surrounding Continuing Applications And Requests For Continued Examination, 7 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 545 (2008), Scott D. Barnett

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

On August 21, 2007, the USPTO published new rules altering the manner in which continuing applications and requests for continued examination could be filed. These new rules represented a drastic departure from traditional practice, and consequently, generated a considerable reaction from the patent community. While some members of the patent community supported the new rules, many others felt that the rules would be insufficient in promoting the USPTO’s goals, and served mainly as an unnecessary roadblock to good-faith patent prosecution. Prior to the rules going into effect, they were challenged in the case Tafas v. Dudas. In Tafas, the district …