Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Efficient Copyright Infringement, David Fagundes

Faculty Articles

Copyright infringement is said to be socially costly because it robs owners of due recompense and depresses incentives for creative production. This Article contends that, in order to achieve copyrights goal of maximizing cultural production, this dominant story of infringement's costs requires alongside it a counter-story identifying the rare but important instances where copyright infringement enhances social welfare. Part I explains the need for an account of the notion of efficient copyright infringement. Other types of unlawful conduct may also be beneficial, but copyright in particular warrants exploration of efficient infringement because maximizing creative production requires some level of unauthorized …

Exposing Latent Patent Infringement, Bryan Blumenkopf

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Consider the following canonical patent infringement scenario. A

[1] plaintiff owns a patent with one or more claims to the patent’s underlying technology. Under 35 U.S.C. § 271(a), this plaintiff has the rights to manufacture, sell, use, or import the technology delineated by those claims.1 The defendant manufactures, sells, uses, or imports what appears to be the same technology. Because the claim language is not entirely clear, a judge construes the exact meaning of the claims in a preliminary hearing.2 Assuming that the patent is upheld as valid, a jury then determines whether the defendant’s device meets the limitations of …

Big Media In Copyright Litigation, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

What role does Big Media play in the courtroom?

Major media companies are often portrayed as aggressive drivers of expansive copyright, dominating every aspect of the legal landscape. When it comes to litigation, however, the truth is more nuanced. My colleague Chris Cotropia and I have recently completed a data collection project in which we examined pleadings from approximately 1,000 copyright cases filed over a four-year period (a statistically significant sample). We are still crunching the numbers, but what we’ve learned so far indicates that record labels, film studios, major software companies, and other behemoths of the copyright world end …

Beyond Microsoft: Intellectual Property, Peer Production And The Law’S Concern With Market Dominance, Daryl Lim

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

An Argument That Independent Creation Is As Likely As Subconscious Copying In Music Infringement Cases, Rebecca Skirpan

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Searching Uspto Trademark Records, Amy Jansen, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Presentation by Amy Jansen and Robert Berry of the Sacred Heart University Library outlining the advantages of federal registration of trademarks and service marks and the steps involved. Includes legal background and examples.

Informal The New Normal, Dick Kawooya

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Online Copyright Protection And Innovation International Experiences And Implications To China, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

Purpose – This study aims to explore the policy-making mechanism of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on innovation and the US practice in identifying policies on online copyright protection and innovation. The research findings provide valuable implications for emerging economies like China.

Design/methodology/approach – For data collection, this study adopted field observation of online interactions. Guided by the democratic paradigm of the civil society, state, and market and the theory of the government’s roles as a broker, advocator, and facilitator, thematic analysis was applied to analyze the 150 purposively selected comments of US internet stakeholders for emerging …

Punishing The Pen With The Sword?: Colombia's New, Extreme, And Ineffective Punishment For Plagiarism, David Cromwell

Washington International Law Journal

The Colombian Supreme Court of Justice recently sentenced a professor to two years in prison for plagiarizing a student’s thesis, an extreme punishment by both comparative and Colombian standards. Despite its severity and global ramifications, the decision has received little attention within the English-speaking legal community. This comment provides an overdue analysis of the case and clarifies the current state of Colombian copyright law, both on the books and on the ground. The comment argues that while the case has clarified that plagiarism is a crime in Colombia, addressing academic plagiarism through criminal punishment will likely do little to deter …

Wag The Dog: Using Incidental Intellectual Property Rights To Block Parallel Imports, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Federal law grants owners of intellectual property rights different degrees of control over parallel imports depending on the nature of their exclusive rights. While trademark owners enjoy strong control over unauthorized imports bearing their marks, their protection is less comprehensive than that granted to owners of copyrights and patents. To broaden their rights, some trademark owners have incorporated copyrighted material into their products or packaging, enabling them to block otherwise lawful imports in contravention of the policies underlying trademark law. A 2013 Supreme Court decision has significantly narrowed the importation ban of copyright law, but there may be pressure to …

Wag The Dog: Using Incidental Intellectual Property Rights To Block Parallel Imports, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Federal law grants owners of intellectual property rights different degrees of control over parallel imports depending on the nature of their exclusive rights. While trademark owners enjoy strong control over unauthorized imports bearing their marks, their protection is less comprehensive than that granted to owners of copyrights and patents. To broaden their rights, some trademark owners have incorporated copyrighted material into their products or packaging, enabling them to block otherwise lawful imports in contravention of the policies underlying trademark law. A 2013 Supreme Court decision has significantly narrowed the importation ban of copyright law, but there may be pressure to …

The Patent System In Pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

The chapter analyzes patent law in Czechoslovakia in the period from 1945 until the end of communist rule in 1989. In addition to reviewing the legislative development of patent law – the laws on the books – the chapter explains the law in action, which includes the application of the law in practice and the attitudes of Czechoslovak society toward inventive activities and patenting. The chapter shows that post-1945 Czechoslovak patent law drew on a highly developed pre-1940 Czechoslovak patent law and practice that was based on the Austrian patent law inherited by Czechoslovakia in 1918 when it split from …

Patent Infringement As Criminal Conduct, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Criminal and civil law differ greatly in their use of the element of intent. The purposes of intent in each legal system are tailored to effectuate very different goals. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060 (2011), however, imported a criminal concept of intent — willful blindness — into the statute for patent infringement, a civil offense, despite these differences. This importation of a criminal law concept of intent into the patent statute is novel and calls for examination. This Article compares the purposes behind intent in criminal law with the …

Copyright And The Fall Line, David Nimmer

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Myriad Choices: University Patents Under The Sun, Jacob H. Rooksby

Law Faculty Publications

How universities handle potentially patentable discoveries made by their faculty reflects important policy decision that affect the greater public. While few research administrators in higher education would dispute that any university-owned patent should be used for society's benefit, the relationship between patents and the public good may be less apparent to those whose primary familiarity with patents stems from recent news reports of "patent trolls" and billion-dollar battles in the smartphone industry. ...

Formalism And Antiformalism In Patent Law Adjudication: Rules And Standards, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit exists at least in part to achieve goals related to patent law that the Supreme Court singularly failed to achieve. Since the Federal Circuit’s inception just over thirty years ago, however, critics have shifted blame for problems with the patent system from the Supreme Court to the Federal Circuit. A common criticism that has gained strength is that the Federal Circuit engages in overly formalistic rule-based adjudication in patent cases. One aspect of this criticism is that the Federal Circuit too often creates rules to govern patent law. In this …

Patent Misjoinder, David O. Taylor

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act effectively repealed aspects of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by creating a new statutory section governing joinder of accused infringers and consolidation of actions for trial in most patent infringement cases. This new law codifies a substantial barrier to joinder and consolidation, contradicting two of the primary policies embraced by the drafters of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: the promotion of liberal standards both for evaluating the sufficiency of pleadings and for evaluating the propriety of joinder of parties. Remarkably, the new statutory section does so despite the absence of any detailed scholarly …

Do Trademark Lawyers Matter?, Deborah Gerhardt, Jon J. Lee

Faculty Articles

This Article empirically examines whether lawyers make a difference in prosecuting federal trademark applications and, if so, how much. Working from a wealth of data the USPTO released in 2012, we examine 5,489,586 federal trademark applications filed since 1984 to determine how much legal representation correlates with success rates in various stages of the trademark application process. First, we show how trademark publication and registration rates have changed over time. Against that background, we examine how these rates differ if the applicant had legal counsel. By illustrating these differences over time, we assess whether trademark registration has become more accessible …

Reply - Commercialization Without Exchange, Michael J. Burstein

Articles

In this brief reply to Prof. Ted Sichelman’s comments on my article Exchanging Information Without Intellectual Property, I argue that justifications for intellectual property that rely on the incentives exclusive rights offer for commercialization are not economically distinguishable from traditional theories based on incentives to invent or create in the first instance. Because innovation is not an event but a process, innovative activities may be subject to misappropriation – and therefore under-production – at multiple points along the supply chain that runs from conception to commercialization. The grant of exclusive rights is an intervention that can be made at any …

Where Corporations Are: Why Casual Visits To New York Are Bad For Business, Jeanne L. Schroeder, David G. Carlson

Articles

In this article, we examine the recent case of Hotel 71 Mezz Lender LLC v. Falor (2010), from the New York Court of Appeals. In this case, New York’s highest court held that LLCs are “present” in New York for jurisdictional purposes when the president of the LLC has submitted to New York jurisdiction in an unrelated law suit against him personally, and where the president came to New York for a deposition in that action. This, we claim, was unconstitutional. In addition, the New York Court of Appeals pronounced itself obliged by the United States Constitution to change the …

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. V. Kirtsaeng, Terence Keegan

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Adjustments, Extensions, Disclaimers, And Continuations: When Do Patent Term Adjustments Make Sense?, Stephanie Plamondon Bair

Faculty Scholarship

The United States patent system represents a measured trade-off between two competing policy considerations: providing sufficient incentives to encourage the innovation and development of new and socially useful inventions; and ensuring that such inventions are readily available to the public at an affordable price. Although the default patent term is now twenty years from filing, various features of, and changes to, the patent system over the years have allowed patent owners to extend the duration of their patent monopolies, sometimes for several years. Such extensions, though seemingly insignificant when compared to the full patent term, have an enormous impact on …

A Numerus Clausus Principle For Intellectual Property, Christina Mulligan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Kirtsaeng And The First-Sale Doctrine's Digital Problem, Clark D. Asay

Faculty Scholarship

Many have lauded the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. as a significant victory for the first-sale doctrine under copyright law. However, in the digital context, the Kirtsaeng holding and the first-sale doctrine in general face extinction. This Essay argues for the first-sale doctrine's survival in the digital context.

A Case For The Public Domain, Clark D. Asay

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several decades open license movements have proven highly successful in the software and content worlds. Such movements rely in part on the belief that greater freedom of use triggers innovative activity that is superior to what a restrictive IP approach produces. Ironically, such open license movements also rely on IP rights to promote their vision of freedom and openness. They do so through IP licenses that, while granting significant freedoms, also impose certain conditions on users such as the “copyleft” requirement in the software world. Such movements rely on this IP-based approach due to fears that, without …

Make The Patent “Polluters” Pay: Using Pigovian Fees To Curb Patent Abuse, James Bessen, Brian Love

Faculty Scholarship

On the heels of a widely reported uptick in egregious patent enforcement, six patent reform bills have been introduced in the last six months. All six bills aim to curb nuisance-value patent litigation, a phenomenon popularly referred to as “patent trolling,” by reducing the cost of defending these suits. In this essay, we argue that these bills, while admirable, treat the symptoms of our patent system’s ills, rather than the disease itself: a growing glut of unused high-tech patents that have little practical value apart from use as vehicles for nuisance-value litigation. Accordingly, we urge Congress to consider one additional …

The Patent Litigation Explosion, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first look at patent litigation hazards for public firms during the 1980s and 1990s. Litigation is more likely when prospective plaintiffs acquire more patents, when firms are larger and technologically close and when prospective defendants spend more on research and development ("R&D"). The latter suggests inadvertent infringement may be more important than piracy. Public firms face dramatically increased hazards of litigation as plaintiffs and even more rapidly increasing hazards as defendants, especially for small public firms. The increase cannot be explained by patenting rates, R&D, firm value or industry composition. Legal changes are the most likely …

The U.S. Proposal For An Intellectual Property Chapter In The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Margot Kaminski, Sean M. Flynn, Brook Baker, Jimmy Koo

Publications

No abstract provided.

Technological Cost As Law In Intellectual Property, Harry Surden

Publications

Changes in the scope of IP legal rights are generally thought to be linked to changes in positive law. This Article argues that shifts in the scope of IP laws are often driven by changes in technological feasibility and not by changes in positive law. Diminishing technological constraint is an under-acknowledged factor driving changes in substantive IP law.

More specifically, there are certain activities that are core to IP law. Such activities include, for example, the copying of creative works in copyright (e.g. duplicating books or music), or the manufacturing of products in patent law. Traditionally, IP legal theory has …

Private Copyright Reform, Kristelia A. García

Publications

The government is not the only player in copyright reform, and perhaps not even the most important. Left to free market negotiation, risk averse licensors and licensees are contracting around the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content, and achieving greater efficiency via private ordering. This emerging phenomenon, herein termed "private copyright reform," presents both adverse selection and distributive justice concerns: first, circumvention of the statutory license goes against legislative intent by allowing for the reduction, and even elimination, of statutorily mandated royalties owed to non-parties. In addition, when presented without full term disclosure, privately determined royalty rates can …