Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

How To Explain The "Implicit Exceptions" To Patent-Eligible Subject Matter, Wesley D. Markham

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The Supreme Court has as of late taken renewed interest in what inventions or discoveries are deserving of entry into the patent system. Section 101 of Title 35 opens the door to "[w]hoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." Certain things--now referenced by the Court as "laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas"--necessarily fall outside the statute's scope. The question is, why? Not why as a matter of policy, but why as a matter of law. The Court has not yet picked (or at …

Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends: Broadway Dramatists, Hollywood Producers, And The Challenge Of Conflicting Copyright Norms, Carol M. Kaplan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In recent decades, studios that own film and television properties have developed business models that exploit the copyrights in those materials in every known market and in all currently conceivable forms of entertainment and merchandising. For the most part, uniform laws and parallel industry cultures permit smooth integration across formats. But theater is different. The work-made-for-hire provisions that allow corporations to function as the authors of the works they contract to create do not easily align with the culture and standard contract provisions of live theater. Conflicts arise when material that begins as a Hollywood property tries to make the …

From State Street Bank To Cls Bank And Back: Reforming Software Patents To Promote Innovation, Parker Hancock

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

For the past several decades, the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit have struggled to determine if, and under what circumstances, software is patentable. Once again, the Federal Circuit had an opportunity to provide clarity when it granted en banc review in CLS Bank. The resulting opinion contained a cursory per curiam decision and numerous concurrences and dissents, showing that the question is far from answered. Ultimately, the struggle over software patentability is not itself the problem, but a symptom of other problems in the patent system. Specifically, other substantive requirements of patentability are not weeding out overly broad patents because …

Explaining The Art Market's Thefts, Frauds, And Forgeries (And Why The Art Market Does Not Seem To Care), Gregory Day

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Based upon a series of interviews with art market experts, this Article identifies and answers a significant, yet previously unexplored economics puzzle affecting the art market. Economics suggests that markets typically produce efficiency and social wealth, but when they fail, most actors should prefer remedial measures over an inefficient status quo. The art market currently is, and has been, plagued with frauds, thefts, forgeries, and market failure--a state of affairs that the governing legal framework has made worse. Despite this, the art market seems to adamantly, and puzzlingly, defend its business culture, rejecting attempts to remedy inefficiencies. In other words, …

Copyright's Knowledge Principle, Jenny L. Sheridan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article argues that copyright jurisprudence has lost sight of the knowledge principle at the heart of the constitutional justification for copyright. The Framers envisioned the objective of copyright as promoting the advancement of knowledge for a democratic society by increasing access to published works. Under what is best termed the "knowledge principle," access to existing knowledge is a necessary condition for the creation of new knowledge. Copyright jurisprudence has largely protected the interests of producers--from early booksellers to modern Hollywood film companies--failing to notice the central role of access to works as a necessary pre-condition to the creation of …

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …

Why Restate The Bundle? The Disintegration Of The Restatement Of Property, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute (ALI) has devoted a great deal of time and energy to restating the law of property. To date, the ALI has produced 17 volumes that bear the name First, Second, or Third Restatement of Property. There is unquestionably much that is valuable in these materials. On the whole, however, the effort has been a disappointment. Some volumes seek faithfully to restate the consensus view of the law; others are transparently devoted to law reform. The ratio of reform to restatement has increased over time, to the point where significant portions of the Third Restatement …

The Idiosyncrasy Of Patent Examiners: Effects Of Experience And Attrition, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, problems with the U.S. patent system have garnered attention from scholars and policymakers of all types. Concerns about the competitiveness of U.S. industry undergird worries that the Great Recession will linger as long as the 1990s downturn in Japan. It is no coincidence that a Congress that has remained at loggerheads on most aspects of economic policy could reach a consensus on the enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, by far the most important statutory reform of U.S. patent law since 1995. Yet, despite Congress's long overdue attention to patent law, it is unlikely …

Concurrent Damages, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Imagine that a hacker is working for a university official secretly spying on faculty members – say, to find out who has been leaking information to the press about internal disciplinary matters. The injuries to a given victim of the hacking might follow a classic learning curve: The first few intrusions into her e-mail account reveal a storehouse of personal secrets, but further break-ins yield less and less new information. One might say there is diminishing marginal harm.

There is no such leveling off, however, in the compensation that would be awarded to that victim. The electronic privacy law …

Fair Use For Free, Or Permitted-But-Paid?, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court in Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios fended a fork in the fair use road. The Court there upset the longstanding expectation that uses would rarely, if ever, be fair when the whole of a work was copied. In the aftermath of that decision, lower courts have rendered a plethora of decisions deeming the copying of an entire work (even with no additional authorship contribution) a fair use, and therefore "free" in both senses of the word. A perceived social benefit or some market failure appears to motivate these decisions. This is because fair …

Property And The Right To Exclude Ii, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In 1998 I published a short essay entitled Property and the Right to Exclude. It appeared in an issue of the Nebraska Law Review honoring Lawrence Berger, a long-time property professor at Nebraska. The essay has been rather widely cited, but I have my doubts as to whether it has been widely read. A review of citations in Westlaw suggests that the essay is commonly identified as arguing that the right to exclude is the "sine qua non" of property, a statement that appears in the opening paragraph. The typical citing author takes this to mean that …

Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Competition law and Intellectual Property have divergent intellectual cultures – the former more pragmatic and experimentalist; the latter influenced by natural law and vested rights. The US Supreme Court decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis is an intellectual victory for the former approach, one that suggests that antitrust law can and should be used to introduce greater scrutiny of the specific consequences of intellectual property grants.

A Framework For Designing Co-Regulation Models Well-Adapted To Technology-Facilitated Sharing Economies, Bryant Cannon, Hanna Chung

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Sharing economies, with their vast diversity of goods and services offered and rapidly evolving business models, have proven inconducive to traditional-regulatory approaches. Yet a complete laissez-faire approach or complete ban is not advisable. On the one hand, it is in the public interest to allow these new economies to continue to innovate, as they create value from unused assets, facilitate useful market transactions, and sometimes even lead to the creation of new goods and services to improve quality of life. On the other hand, some characteristics inherent in the design of sharing economies lead to negative externalities, disrupt city planning …

Civil Cyberconflict: Microsoft, Cybercrime, And Botnets, Janine S. Hiller

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Cyber “warfare” and hackback by private companies is a hot discussion topic for its potential to fight cybercrime and promote cybersecurity. In the shadow of this provocative discussion, Microsoft has led a concerted, sustained fight against cybercriminals by using traditional legal theories and court actions to dismantle criminal networks known as botnets. This article brings focus to the role of the private sector in cybersecurity in light of the aggressive civil actions by Microsoft to address a thorny and seemingly intractable global problem. A botnet is a network of computers infected with unauthorized code that is controlled from a distance …

Accountability In The Patent Market: A Duty To Monitor Patent Risk From The Boardroom, Ian David Mcclure

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Patent risk is on the rise; and not just because there is more patent litigation now than ever before. The value of strategic patent management is no longer an unknown or ignored ingredient to corporate success. Nor is proactive and pragmatic patent risk assessment. Shareholders and investors have now caught on that patent management and patent risk affect the value of their equity. This realization has initiated a circuitous life cycle in which more patents are being transacted, divested and strategically managed, resulting in more patent risk for operating companies to monitor. Yet, this last piece—the proactive monitoring of patent …

Long On Rhetoric, Short On Results: Agile Methods And Cyber Acquisitions In The Department Of Defense, Daniel E. Schoeni Usaf

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Cyber warfare has arrived. The Department of Defense (DoD) is under attack, and our security is at stake. Yet in a field defined by its rapid growth, the DoD arms itself at the same pace that that it buys major weapons systems, an acquisition cycle of 7–10 years. It thus buys obsolete cyber-defense tools. The “arsenal of democracy” has already provided us the tools for overcoming this impediment in the form of agile software-development methods. Yet the DoD has been reluctant to set aside decades of experience and utilize different methods for software than it does for other acquisitions. But …

Keeping Up With The Game: The Use Of The Nash Bargaining Solution In Patent Infringement Cases, Lance Wyatt

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Determining damages is an integral stage in the patent litigation process. Since 1970, reasonable royalty damages have been calculated using the factors set forth in the seminal decision Georgia-Pacific Corp. v. United States Plywood Corp. However, these factors are prone to manipulation and abuse by damages experts. To address this abuse, damages experts have utilized a solution to a two-person bargaining situation, the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), as a method to calculate reasonable royalty damages in patent infringement cases. Since the introduction of NBS in patent infringement cases, courts have been reluctant to admit the use of the NBS to …

Crowdfunding's Impact On Start-Up Ip Strategy, Sean M. O'Connor

Articles

This Paper proceeds in Part I by reviewing the crowdfunding landscape and its potential benefits for start-ups, especially with regard to IP strategies. Part II examines the provisions of the JOBS Act and argues that the disclosure requirements of the CROWDFUND Act title will make the latter less attractive than other start-up financing options and may negatively affect start-ups’ IP strategies, in part by risking the disclosure of enabling aspects of patentable inventions.

Part III explores issues arising from the widespread involvement of many potentially unsophisticated investors who have no connection to the start-up. This contrasts with current unsophisticated investors …

Aereo And Cablevision: How Courts Are Struggling To Harmonize The Public Performance Right With Online Retransmission Of Broadcast Television, Sam Méndez

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Americans increasingly turn to the computer instead of the television to gain access to their favorite shows. With this in mind, Aereo allows its subscribers to stream broadcast television content to their computers, but does not compensate the broadcasters for these retransmissions. The broadcasters argue this violates their public performance right under the Copyright Act’s Transmit Clause, but because of Aereo’s curious technology platform, in which thousands of tiny antennas are each assigned to a unique subscriber, infringement is uncertain. The Supreme Court will soon hear American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., arising out of the Second Circuit, …

Intent In Fair Use, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

This Article explores the role of intent in the context of fair use. Specifically, it examines whether a claim of fair use of a copyrighted work should be assessed solely from an “objectively reasonable” vantage point or should, additionally, allow for evidence from the subjective perspective of the user. Courts and scholars have largely sided with the former view but have failed to explain fully why this should be the case or whether there might be countervailing benefits to considering evidence of subjective intent. Crucially overlooked is the possibility that taking the user’s perspective into account would serve copyright’s utilitarian …

Constitutional Obstacles? Reconsidering Copyright Protection For Pre-1972 Sound Recordings, Eva E. Subotnik, June M. Besek

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The typical complaint about intellectual property laws is that they are sluggish in responding to technological change. An unfolding question in the contemporary era, however, is the degree to which the threat of constitutional challenge will lead Congress to further adhere to the status quo. In the wake of the patent law overhaul several years ago, for example, the wisdom and scope of those amendments were widely debated, but concern about their constitutional soundness was also expressed in some quarters. Likewise, the latter concern is in play with respect to a proposed amendment of the law that applies to …

Dilution At The Patent And Trademark Office, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This Article undertakes the first systematic investigation of trademark dilution in registration practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The Article consists of three distinct descriptive empirical analyses. In the first, I present a new hand-coded dataset of all 453 Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) dispositions of dilution claims through June 30, 2014, and report that dilution has been necessary to the PTO’s refusal of exactly three registrations in over a decade. In the second part, I apply algorithmic coding of the recently released PTO Casefiles Dataset to demonstrate that concurrent registration of identical marks to different …

A Eulogy For The Eula, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Rakoff shook his brightly dyed red hair as he shivered alongside the others waiting for the bullet train. It was a miserably cold morning, but Rakoff's fellow passengers didn't seem to mind. Most of those standing on the platform were taking their spare moments to work in the global workspace. It looked like they were talking to themselves, typing on invisible keyboards, or blinking, but in fact they were working, completing crowdsourcing tasks. Other waiting passengers were interacting with business contacts by projecting their avatars out into the virtuality. It was cold, but there was not long to wait …

Regulatory Monopoly And Differential Pricing In The Market For Patents, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patents are limited-term monopolies awarded to inventors to incentivize innovation. But there is another monopoly that has been largely overlooked at the heart of patent law: the monopoly of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) over the granting of patents. This Article addresses this topic by developing the notion of a regulatory monopoly, where a single governmental actor has the power to set prices in a regulatory area.

The Article explains how regulatory monopolists like the PTO could enhance social welfare via differential pricing-by charging regulated entities differing fees based on their willingness and ability to pay. In particular, …

Legislating Trust, John D. Gregory

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

As governments in Canada and elsewhere have considered statutes to ensure that electronic communications are legally effective, they have invariably had to face questions about the reliability of those communications. Can we trust electronic messages, documents, and signatures? Are they the same in law as if they were on paper? What conditions should be imposed in order to give us the right assurances that we can trust them? To answer these questions properly, we need to understand the nature of “trust” and the extent to which legislation can be a source of it, and what other sources should be enlisted …

Atteinte À La Vie Privée Et Publicité Comportementale, Virginie Blanchette-Séguin

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Le présent texte aura pour objet les questions relatives à la vie privée que soulève la publicité comportementale et le suivi des activités des individus qu’elle implique par définition. Pour ce faire, nous délimiterons d’abord le spectre du droit à la vie privée en droit québécois dans ce contexte (I.) et nous poursuivrons selon une approche plus critique en nous prononçant sur les différents arguments pouvant être soulevés quant à l’absence d’une perception humaine dans une violation potentielle du droit à la vie privée (II.)

Fan Fiction And Canadian Copyright Law: Defending Fan Narratives In The Wake Of Canada's Copyright Reforms, Rebecca Katz

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Amateur, non-commercial writing based on contemporary copyrighted works — “fan fiction” — is a practice that is worth defending despite its unclear status vis a vis copyright law. In this article, I assess how Canadian fan authors may defend their works using Canadian copyright law. I argue that the recent copyright reforms are promising for fan and other second generation creators. The new fair dealing categories of parody and satire are positive steps, though the broad and technologically neutral non-commercial user-generated content provi-sion may be the most promising reform of all. I begin with an exploration of the benefits of …

The Natural Complexity Of Patent Eligibility, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

It has long been assumed that the doctrine of patent eligibility’s prohibition of patents on “laws of nature,” “natural phenomena,” and “products of nature” rests on legalistic interpretations of those terms. But there is good reason to doubt this assumption. Since the doctrine’s inception, the Supreme Court has yet to provide any framework, formula, or factors explaining these “natural” terms. Rather, the Court has increasingly fixated on a list of scientific tropes, such as gravity, the heat of the Sun, and extracted metals, that it believes are true examples of “natural laws,” “phenomena,” and “products.”

An actual examination of scientific …

Preliminary Injunctions Post-Mayo And Myriad, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court's recent interest in patentable subject matter has had several, unexpected downstream effects on preliminary injunctions in patent disputes.

The Supreme Court has recently expressed increased interest in patent eligibility, or patentable subject matter, the doctrine that limits the types of inventions eligible for patenting. Its two decisions, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., in 2012, and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., in 2013, represented the first broad restrictions on patentable subject matter in over thirty years. And later this term, the Court will decide yet another patent eligibility case: Alice Corp. v. CLS …

Intellectual Property’S Lessons For Information Privacy, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

There is an inherent tension between an individual’s desire to safeguard her personal information and the expressive rights of businesses seeking to communicate that information to others. This tension has multiplied as consumers generate and businesses collect more and more personal data online, forcing efforts to strike an appropriate balance between privacy and commercial speech. No consensus on this balance has been reached. Some privacy scholars bemoan what they see as a slanted playing field in favor of those wishing to profit from the private details of other people’s lives. Others contend that the right in free expression must always …