Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Liability For Trademark Infringement For Internet Service Providers, Katja Weckström

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

In the wake of the millennium and the rise of the internet, legislative action was taken to shelter internet service providers (ISPs) from various forms of legal action. In the turmoil of chartering new and unregulated territory, such a safe harbor was deemed necessary to protect startup businesses. Today, these internet actors (e.g. Google, Amazon, and eBay) have grown strong and powerful. Thus, intellectual property holders have started to challenge this privilege in court. Increasingly, owners of famous marks seek liability and damages for direct and indirect trademark infringement in courts around the globe. This Article will focus on liability …

Deviated, Unsound, And Self-Retreating: A Critical Assessment Of The Princo V. Itc En Banc Decision, Richard Li-Dar Wang

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

The licensing dispute between Philips and Taiwan CD-R/RW manufacturers has been a powerful generator of new developments in the field of patent and competition, which culminated with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's Princo en banc decision in 2010. By adding new elements to the patent-misuse test, this decision confined the applicable area of the patent-misuse doctrine to the restrictions that patent owners impose on licensees, thus substantially constraining its scope and changing its landscape. After careful review of the Federal Circuit's holding and reasoning, this article finds that this decision deviating from United States Supreme …

Unlocking The Genome: The Legal Case Against Genetic Diagnostic Patents, Tiana Leia Russell

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

New, innovative genetic diagnostic methods are rapidly changing the way diseases are diagnosed, prevented, and treated. While personalized medicine remains it its early stages, its potential to improve patients’ lives cannot be overstated. As advances in biotechnology offer patients the promise of improved healthcare choices, a heated debate has arisen over the propriety of patents on genetic diagnostics, and whether anyone has the right to own the information that is encoded in a person’s genes. This paper outlines recent litigation surrounding genetic and advanced diagnostic patents and examines whether they constitute patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Part …

Emerging Scholars Series: Trade Dress Rights As Instruments Of Monopolistic Competition: Towards A Rejuvenation Of The Misappropriation Doctrine In Unfair Competition Law And A Property Theory Of Trademarks, Apostolos Chronopoulos

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

The protection of trade dress restricts the ability of competitors to compete by imitation. It may also interfere with the public’s ability to copy product features that have been disclosed in expired utility and design patents. These concerns about the anticompetitive potential of trade dress claims have prompted the Supreme Court to tighten the requirements for protecting product configurations under the Lanham Act. To be protectable, the design under consideration should have already acquired secondary meaning. Furthermore, the functionality doctrine may bar protection even though there are enough alternative product configurations at the disposal of competitors so as to market …

Websites And Intangible Asset Amortization Under 26 U.S.C. § 197: A Marriage That Bears Little Fruit, Christopher H. Bowen

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Websites are not only an important part of our electronic lives, they are an important financial and business asset in their own right. With the growth of the internet as a commercial, informational, and recreational resource, companies utilize websites as an important part of their corporate financial portfolio and structure. The increased value of websites that comes from this growth has made websites a valuable asset that companies seek to use as they would other business assets. One important consideration is how the value of websites will be treated upon sale or exchange. In other words, is the website an …

Table Of Contents

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

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Structural Uncertainty: Understanding The Federal Circuit's Lead Compound Analysis, Briana Barron

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Recently, the Federal Circuit and lower courts have applied a new test to assess the question of obviousness for chemical compounds. While courts have always considered the presence of some lead compound to be relevant to the question of obviousness, beginning at the turn of the millennium, the Federal Circuit began assessing obviousness in a more formulaic fashion, applying what is commonly referred to as the lead compound analysis to determine if a litigant has established a prima facie case of obviousness. This Paper describes the development of the lead compound analysis, and its application. This Paper then discusses some …

International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Reviewing The (Shrinking) Principle Of Trademark Exhaustion In The European Union (Ten Years Later), Irene Calboli

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Ten years ago, I published an article in the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review titled “Trademark Exhaustion in the European Union: Community-Wide or International? The Saga Continues.” In that article, I described the development of the principle of trademark exhaustion in the European Union (EU) and analyzed the interplay among trademark protection, trademark territoriality, and the treatment of the parallel importation of gray market products—unauthorized genuine goods imported from foreign countries—under Article 7 of the Trademark Directive (Article 7). In this Essay, I continue to explore, ten years after my 2002 article, the development of the principle of trademark exhaustion …

Contract + Tort = Property: The Trade Secret Illusion, Matthew Edward Cavanaugh

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This article commences with an introduction to the use of Hegel’s famous dialectical method as an arithmetic analysis of law. It reviews Hegel’s assertion that the sum of property and contract is tort and crime, and then suggests a better dialectic is that contract plus tort equals property. This article then reviews the doctrines of contract, tort, and property, focusing on the plaintiff’s rights and remedies, and who can be defendants in each of the three doctrines. The article next reviews the law of one particular type of intellectual property, trade secrets, because this article uses trade secrets as a …

What Good Is Fame If You Can't Be Famous In Your Own Right?: Publicity Right Woes Of The Almost Famous, Porsche Farr

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

What exactly is the price of fame? For many Emerging Celebrities, the cost of fame is the forfeiture of significant portions of the rights of their personas. More specifically, reality television stars hoping to enter the entertainment industry and amateur athletes hoping to eventually enter into professional leagues face parallel experiences of being forced into industry standard contracts in which they must give up a significant amount of publicity rights. In giving up these rights, these Emerging Celebrities forfeit millions-of-dollars of potential income to their respective industries, which they could have generated for themselves by freely utilizing their publicity rights …

God In The Machine: Encryption Algorithms And The Abstract Exemption To Patentability, Jeremy R. Hager

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This Comment explores the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bilski v. Kappos upon the patentability of encryption schemes for digital content. While the majority of commentary concerning this anticlimactic decision has focused on the heated topic of software patents, little attention has been paid to the analogous field of cryptographic technology—and the patentability thereof—in light of Bilski’s “guidance.” Cryptographic technology, commonly utilized to protect digital content under the moniker Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, has been utilized by all major content-producing industries to prevent copying by consumers of various content mediums, from software to …

International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Using Intellectual Property Rights To Create Value In The Coffee Industry, Daphne Zografos Johnson

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Coffee is the single most important tropical commodity traded worldwide. It is produced in over 50 developing countries, and it is estimated that some 20 million rural families, or 125 million people, depend on growing coffee throughout the world for their livelihoods. Over the past decade, coffee producers have been facing considerable difficulties because of low and unstable coffee prices. In 2002, coffee prices collapsed to 100-year lows in real terms, leading to a world coffee crisis. Meanwhile, the coffee economy in high income countries has been moving in the opposite direction, and the crisis is hardly visible from Starbucks-type …

Table Of Contents

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

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International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Intellectual Property And Asian Values, Peter K. Yu, Peter K. Yu

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

From Niall Ferguson to Fareed Zakaria, commentators have paid growing attention to the rise of Asia and its implications for the West. Recent years have also seen the emergence of a growing volume of literature on intellectual property developments in Asia, in particular China and India. Few commentators, however, have explored whether Asian countries will take unified positions on international intellectual property law and policy.

Commissioned for the Inaugural International Intellectual Property Scholars Series, this article fills the void by examining intellectual property developments in relation to the decades-old 'Asian values' debate. Drawing on the region's diversity in economic and …

Open Textbooks And Provincial Government Policy: A Look At The Issues, Lisa Di Valentino

FIMS Publications

In 2012, the British Columbia government announced a plan to fund a program that will result in the creation of open access textbooks for 40 lower-year university courses — the first such program in any of the provinces. This paper will argue that Ontario should follow British Columbia’s lead and invest in the development of a project to create and promote the use of open textbooks. The introduction will discuss the concept of open textbooks and the various initiatives and legislation that have been introduced in the United States, and British Columbia’s plan will be described in more detail. The …

What If The Big Bad Wolf In All Those Fairy Tales Was Just Misunderstood?: Techniques For Maintaining Narrative Rationality While Altering Stock Stories That Are Harmful To Your Client’S Case, Jennifer Sheppard

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Cognitive researches have established that humans think in terms of stories and, consequently, are persuaded by stories. That means that lawyers must be wary of stock stories that effect how an audience views a given set of circumstances. When a stock story is so pervasive that it will not allow a lawyer to ignore it or a more favorable alternative story does not exist, a lawyer can present the client's story from an alternative perspective that will not evoke the embedded knowledge structures triggered by the unfavorable stock story. The lawyer can accomplish this by tinkering with the different threads …

Drafting A Solution: Impact Of The New Salary System On The First-Year Major League Baseball Amateur Draft, Nicholas A. Deming

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Major League Baseball has evolved over the years. What was once a game played by residents of small towns across the country is now a multibillion dollar industry with international ties and ever-expanding exposure. With this transformation, the needs of the game have changed and its place in the judicial framework is unsettled. Currently, there is a growing discrepancy between small-market and large-market Major League Baseball teams. In part, the first-year amateur draft often fails to steer the most talented players to the worst teams because of financial concerns surrounding signing rookies. Major League Baseball had the opportunity to fix …

Libel Capital No More? Reforming British Defamation Law, Stephen Bates

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

London has long been known as the libel capital of the world. Through substantive law, expansive jurisdiction, and high litigation costs, the British courts strongly favor libel plaintiffs. Aspects of the system have come under increasing criticism from a variety of sources, including academics, nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the European Court of Human Rights, the British Ministry of Justice, and a committee of the House of Commons. In March 2011, the British government proposed far-reaching reforms. Four months later, however, new revelations emerged about phone-hacking by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. As a consequence, the …

Parody Or Identity Theft: The High-Wire Act Of Digital Doppelgangers In California, Katharine Malone

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Several recent high-profile instances of cyberbullying and online impersonation have prompted state legislatures to take action against this real and growing problem. As part of this trend, California recently enacted Senate Bill 1411, which criminalizes "e-personation." At first glance, this statute looks perfectly reasonable: it is short, filled with good intentions, and merely applies existing harassment, intimidation and fraud laws to the relatively recent medium of the Internet. However, a thorough read reveals vague and overly broad language which could result in chilled political activism and free speech. This note analyzes the statute and attempts to provide some guidance on …

Privacy In Social Media: The Right Of Publicity, S. Michael Kernan

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

The increasing ubiquity of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, has led to a growing concern regarding the right of privacy on the internet. The myriad of common law cases on the issue provide website operators (and their advertisers) with little or no clear direction as to what is and is not permitted. At the same time, as websites monetize using an advertising model, that monetization is colliding with privacy rights, specifically, the right of publicity. The right of publicity has been heavily litigated lately, in particular against Facebook as it attempts to monetize its massive user base. This …

Ambush Marketing: Dissecting The Discourse, Brian Lee Pelanda

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This article discusses the problematic discourse in which scholars and corporate complainants such as the International Olympic Committee have discussed the issue of ambush marketing. It argues that those who persistently complain about ambush marketing have wielded the term far too liberally, and thus a great deal of confusion exists between the generally accepted definition of ambush marketing and the reality of the circumstances surrounding the numerous marketing strategies that the term is commonly used to describe. While much of the current literature on the subject concludes that the existing state of the law in the United States is not …

“I Agreed To What?”: A Call For Enforcement Of Clarity In The Presentation Of Privacy Policies, David Thompson

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Though the federal government has enacted statutes regulating privacy policies in limited contexts, there is no generally applicable law governing the nature of privacy policies across all industries. In light of the ever-increasing prevalence of user data collection and the widespread failure of companies under the self-regulatory model to make their policies readable, of reasonable length, and placed in a noticeable location, I argue that such a regulation should be promulgated.

This note will address the difficulties of preserving one's privacy in the digital era, discuss common shortcomings of privacy policies, explore the negative consequences of these shortcomings, then analyze …

Dropped Calls: The Extent Of The Free Speech Guarantee To Wireless Communications Service, Candice Shin

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

From former President Hosni Mubarak's final days as ruler of Egypt to the Bay Area Rapid Transit's response to the protests on August 11, 2011, governmental entities have increasingly responded to civil unrest by restricting or shutting down wireless communication networks to thrwart further coordination among civilian agitators. Whether BART itself faces another occasion in which to consider disabling its wireless infrastructure, future protests and threats to public safety in the United States are inevitable. To that end, Congress has considered bills that would grant the President the ability to essentially shut down the Internet, including the Protecting Cyberspace as …

Making Non-Competes Unenforceable, Viva R. Moffat

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The law of employee non-competition agreements is a mess. Differing standards, unpredictability, and uncertainty within and between jurisdictions is the norm. The variability in state law provides a significant incentive on both sides to forum shop when a dispute over a non-compete arises. This forum shopping leads to conflicts of law, and choice of law doctrine does not resolve these disputes in a satisfactory way. Because non-compete law is often a matter of fundamental public policy, the use of escape valves from the operation of conflicts principles means that there is no predictability or certainty in non-compete litigation. The search …

A New Institutional Economics Perspective On Trademarks: Rebuilding Post Conflict Zones In Sierra Leone And Croatia, 11 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 745 (2012), Roya Ghafele, Benjamin Gibert

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

This paper evaluates the role of collective trademarks in enhancing the ability of tourism clusters to stimulate economic growth, local ownership and innovative governance. Illustrating how intellectual property (IP) law can be leveraged to achieve this, we offer a new economic rationale for trademarks in the context of tourism. Two post-conflict case studies of Sierra Leone and Croatia provide a crash test for this approach. By emphasizing the role of law, institutions and infrastructure in stimulating tourism in post-conflict zones, this paper echoes new institutional economics perspectives that highlight the impact of legal structure on development. Despite widespread acknowledgement of …

Fostering Web 2.0 Innovation: The Role Of The Judicial Interpretation Of The Dmca Safe Harbor, Secondary Liability And Fair Use, 12 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 70 (2012), Susanna Monseau

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Web 2.0 has generated a surplus of creativity, encouraging innovation of new technologies and further creative expansion of the internet. Social media platforms have demonstrated a significant growth during this time and have been used to create and disseminate a wealth of information and cultural material. While it is important that copyright owners receive legal protection of the content they create, it is necessary not to simultaneously stifle the creativity of end-users. Copyright owners have more power in bargaining for their rights, and their rights are well established through statutory protections. However, internet innovators and end-users, who may have a …

Three Theories Of Copyright In Ratings, James Grimmelmann

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Are ratings copyrightable? The answer depends on what ratings are. As a history of copyright in ratings shows, some courts treat them as unoriginal facts, some treat them as creative opinions, and some treat them as troubling self-fulfilling prophecies. The push and pull among these three theories explains why ratings are such a difficult boundary case for copyright, both doctrinally and theoretically. The fact-opinion tension creates a perverse incentive for raters: the less useful a rating, the more copyrightable it looks. Self-fulfilling ratings are the most troubling of all: copyright's usual balance between incentives and access becomes indeterminate when ratings …

Trolling For Standards: How Courts And The Administrative State Can Help Deter Patent Holdup And Promote Innovation, Niels J. Melius

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Antitrust law and patent law share the common goal of improving economic welfare by facilitating competition and innovation. But these legal fields conflict when baseless claims of patent infringement disrupt the competitive process. In its eBay decision, the Supreme Court muddied the precedential waters by promulgating a vague doctrine of injunctive relief in patent infringement cases. In the years since, a split has emerged in the district courts on the question of which entities generally qualify for injunctive relief as an additional remedy to damages. This uncertainty has failed to mitigate an antitrust phenomenon known as "patent holdup," whereby an …

Legal Writing, The Remix: Plagiarism And Hip Hop Ethics, 63 Mercer L. Rev. 597 (2012), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I focus on hip hop music and culture as an access point to teach first-year law students about the academic and professional pitfalls of plagiarism. Hip hop provides a good model for comparison because most entering students are immersed in a popular culture that is saturated with allusions to hip hop. As a point of reference for incoming law students, hip hop possesses a valuable currency as it represents something real, experienced, and relatable.

Significant parallels exist between the cultures of United States legal writing and hip hop, although attempting direct analogies would be absurd. Chief among …

Made In America: Is The Idpppa The Answer To The United States Fashion Industry's Quest For Design Protection?, Courtney Daniels

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.