Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Individual Inventor Motif In The Age Of The Patent Troll, Christopher A, Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

The individual inventor motif has been part of American patent law since its inception. The question is whether the recent patent troll hunt has damaged the individual inventor's image and, in turn, caused Congress, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and the courts to become less concerned with patent law's impact on the small inventor. This Article explores whether there has been a change in attitude by looking at various sources from legislative, administrative, and judicial actors in the patent system, such as congressional statements and testimony in discussions of the recent proposed patent reform legislation, the USPTO …

The Folly Of Early Filing In Patent Law, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

This Article questions the conventional wisdom that the patent system should continue to encourage "early filing" of patent applications-filing at the beginning stages of technological development. The current thinking regarding early filing fails to account for the lack of technical and market information available about the invention at the early stages of development. A "file early, file often" mentality is instilled in inventors, exacerbating such systemic patent problems as too many patent applications, too many patents, underdevelopment of patented technology, increased assertion of patent rights, and fuzzy patent boundaries, to name a few. The Article suggests that in response patent …

Amazon's Kindle 2: The Copyright Ghost In The Machine, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

A number of copyright controversies have caught the public’s eye this year — e.g., the lawsuit over the AP photo of Barak Obama, the feud between Coldplay and Joe Satriani, the debate about Facebook’s policies toward the intellectual property of its users. Yet these disputes, fascinating though they are, involve the application of well-known legal principles. The facts are interesting, but the law is straightforward.

A somewhat less prominent controversy, however, offers a nice example of the frequent collision between copyright law, established business models, and new technologies. In February, Amazon introduced the Kindle 2 — the latest model of …

Two Copyright Lessons From A Pop Music Controversy, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

People who study copyright law for a living must frequently endure the disappointment of seeing an interesting case settle out of court. For example, lurking behind the current Google Books controversy is a fascinating fair use argument – but if the proposed settlement manages to survive antitrust and other challenges, no court will ever have a chance to rule on the fair use issue. And scholars like me will be left wondering what might have been (and whether the settlement actually prejudices future fair use arguments).

Sometimes, however, even a settlement teaches us something about the law. The recent lawsuit …

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Jessica M. Yoke

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present the third issue of the 2008–2009 academic school year, which also is our Annual Survey on E-Discovery.

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Bridget Murray

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present the fourth issue of the 2008–2009 academic school year. Our authors analyze a variety of controversial legal topics that are at the forefront of debates regarding the intersection of technology and law.

How “Choruss” Can Turn Into A Cacophony: The Record Industry’S Stranglehold On The Future Of Music Business, Andrey Spektor

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

A sixty year-old man is delighted when his son shows him how to use Pandora—an interactive, hip Internet radio site that puts the listener in control. Having grown up a huge Louis Armstrong fan, the man quickly selects the jazz singer as one of his “stations.” When listening to this station, Pandora will only play songs by Armstrong and other similar artists for him. When he hears Armstrong’s classic, “What a Wonderful World,” the man immediately clicks the “Thumbs Up” icon, indicating his approval of Pandora’s recommendation. Pandora’s recommendations are drawn from its “Music Genome Project,” a database of song …

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Robert Michaux

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present the second issue of the 2009–2010 academic year.

Dreadful Policing: Are The Semiconductor Industry Giants Content With Yesterday’S International Protection For Integrated Circuits?, Michael Fuerch

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Over the past twenty years, the semiconductor industry has grown rapidly. Technological advances have resulted in smaller, faster, and more cost-efficient semiconductor integrated circuits. Today, integrated circuits (“chips”) are found in the majority of electronic devices includes consumer electronics like computers, phones, televisions, and automobiles, and industrial electronics such as motor drives and programmable logic controllers.

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The Law, Culture, And Economics Of Fashion, C. Scott Hemphill, Jeannie Suk

Center for Contract and Economic Organization

Fashion is one of the world’s most important creative industries. It is the major output of a global business with annual U.S. sales of more than $200 billion — larger than those of books, movies, and music combined. Everyone wears clothing and inevitably participates in fashion to some degree. Fashion is also a subject of periodically rediscovered fascination in virtually all the social sciences and the humanities. It has provided economic thought with a canonical example in theorizing about consumption and conformity. Social thinkers have long treated fashion as a window upon social class and social change. Cultural theorists have …

The New Invention Creation Activity Boundary In Patent Law, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

This Essay identifies a new boundary in patent law - illegal or immoral invention creation activity - and explores the possible chal­lenges and opportunities it may facilitate. The boundary currently is neither robust nor extensive, and whether and under what cir­cumstances it should exist at all is open to debate.

Copyright And Copy-Reliant Technology, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Part I of this Article introduces the phenomenon of copy-reliant tech­nology by focusing on four significant case studies. The first case study, Field v. Google Inc., centers on the permissibility of automated archiving in the context of text-based search engines. The second case study, Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., centers on the creation and display of thumb­nail representations of copyrighted photographs by image-based search en­gines. The conduct challenged in the third case study, the Google Book Project, relates both to the generation of metadata and to the display of fragments of books as part of a menu …

Ideology And Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property: An Empirical Study, Matthew Sag, Tonja Jacobi, Maxim Sytch

Faculty Articles

In this Article, we examine the effect of judicial ideology on IP case outcomes before the Supreme Court from 1954 to 2006. We find that ideology is a significant determinant of IP cases: the more conservative a justice is, the more likely he or she is to vote in favor of recognizing and enforcing rights to intellectual property. We also find evidence that the relationship is more complex than a purely ideological account would suggest; our results suggest that law matters too. We find that a number of factors that are specific to IP are also consequential. Additionally, we show …

Crystals In The Public Domain, David Fagundes

Faculty Articles

The law increasingly treats copyright as if it were any other form of property, and numerous writers decry this trend. In particular, scholars who express solicitude for the public domain fear that the "propertization" of copyright threatens an inevitable accretion of pri­vate rights in information at the expense of the public domain. This Ar­ticle questions this conventional view, arguing that the propertization of copyright has unappreciated advantages for users of public information. The conventional view relies on an overly narrow view of what properti­zation means. The treatment of copyright as a form of property gener­ally entails not only reduction of …

Fixing A Hole: Eliminating Ownership Uncertainties To Facilitate University-Generated Innovation, Anthony J. Luppino

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Brand Spillovers, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

This Article considers the spillover effects of trademarks - in particular, brand spillovers, which occur when consumer interest in a trademark increases the profits of third parties who do not own the trademark. Using techniques such as loss leaders and shelf space adjacency, retailers routinely create brand spillovers for their profit, and trademark law generally has not restricted these activities. Online intermediaries, such as search engines, also create and profit from brand spillovers by selling manufacturers' trademarks for advertising purposes (keyword triggering). However, in contrast to retailer practices, keyword triggering has sparked a heated and irresolute battle over its legitimacy …

Copyright Law: The Last Five Years Of Journal Coverage, Tyler T. Ochoa

Faculty Publications

Five years ago, I was asked to write an essay to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal. In that essay, I surveyed the major developments in copyright law during the previous twenty years and documented how those developments had been chronicled (or foreshadowed) in the Journal. Today, as the Journal publishes the first issue of its 25th volume, I take this opportunity to look back at the Journal's coverage of copyright law during the past five years.

Conversations With Renowned Professors On The Future Of Copyright, James Boyle, Elizabeth Townsend Gard

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Allocating Patent Rights Between Earlier And Later Inventions, Charles W. Adams

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …

Solutions For Disputes Over Intellectual Property Between Taiwan And China – Analyzing Arbitration, Szu-Chou Peng, Fu-Jung Wu

Barry Law Review

Increasing business transactions between Taiwan and China have caused international intellectual property disputes to become a new and serious problem for Taiwanese businessmen who have direct and indirect investments in trade. In order to solve this problem, Taiwan and China sequentially set special regulations. For example, section 74 of the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area was enacted by the government of Taiwan to recognize China’s civil arbitration procedures. On July 23, 2004, China established the Regulations of the Supreme People’s Court Regarding the People’s Courts’ Recognition of the Civil Judgments Rendered by …

Patent Breaking Or Balancing?: Separating Strands Of Fact From Fiction Under Trips., Cynthia M. Ho

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of when compulsory licensing of patents is permissible as a matter of international law under the Agreement of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property TRIPS).Thailand's recent compulsory licenses of patents on a variety of medications provide a convenient vehicle to analyze the limits of compulsory licensing under TRIPS. Thailand's actions are unique; most countries hesitate to issue compulsory licenses in the wake of legal uncertainties regarding TRIPS requirements as well as political pressure. This article capitalizes on the many issues involved in Thailand's licenses to provide an authoritative interpretation of the scope of compulsory …

Ideology And Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property — An Empirical Study., Matthew Sag

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Bringing Down The Walls: How Technology Is Being Used To Thwart Parallel Importers Amid The International Confusion Concerning Exhaustion Of Rights, Ryan L. Vinelli

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the tension between intellectual property rights and free trade, highlighting the conflict arising from market segmentation strategies employed by companies like Sony. It argues that the lack of a uniform international standard on the exhaustion of rights exacerbates this issue, suggesting that an international regime under the WTO could mitigate market segmentation and promote free trade.

The Death Of Copyright Protection In Individual Price Valuations, A Flawed Merger Doctrine, And Financial Market Manipulation: New York Mercantile Exchange V. Intercontinentalexchange, Jeremy V. Murray

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Harry Potter And The Copyright Act: Have The Courts Finally Waved A Magic Wand By Defining Fair Use For Secondary Authors, Meg Reid

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

2008 Patent Law Decisions Of The Federal Court A Review Of Recent Decisions Of The United States Court Of Appeals For The Federal Circuit: Area Summaries, Todd Zubler, Nina Tallon, Jamie Wisz, Jamaica Szeliga

American University Law Review

The United States Supreme Court took a slight breather from patent-law issues in 2008. After issuing three patent-law decisions in 2007 (including KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc.), the Court issued just one patent-law decision in 2008—Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. Despite the Supreme Court’s slower pace, however, the Court’s influence loomed large in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2008. In a number of cases, the Federal Circuit continued to work through the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent precedents, most notably KSR and the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay Inc. …

A New Interface Between Copyright Law And Technology: How User-Generated Content Will Shape The Future Of Online Distribution, Maria Lillà Montagnani

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Uneasy Case For Intellectual Property Rights In Traditional Knowledge, Stephen R. Munzer, Kal Raustiala

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Draconian Or Just? Adopting The Italian Model Of Imposing Administrative Fines On The Purchasers Of Counterfeit Goods, Amanda Silverman

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the effectiveness of penalizing consumers for purchasing counterfeit goods, focusing on Italy's approach and its implications for the U.S. It argues that such penalties can deter demand and reduce counterfeiting, aligning with the propertization of trademarks. The analysis highlights enforcement challenges, including proving consumer intent, and suggests using objective criteria like price and seller credibility. The note proposes adopting Italy's model in the U.S. to protect intellectual property and consumer trust, despite potential privacy concerns and enforcement difficulties.