Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Trademark Laundering, Useless Patents, And Other Ip Challenges For The Marijuana Industry, Sam Kamin, Viva R. Moffat University Of Denver College Of Law

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Exceptions To Prosecution History Estoppel Are Hardly A Dime A Dozen: An Analysis Of The Federal Circuit’S Application Of The Narrow Exceptions To Prosecution History Estoppel Twelve Years After Festo, Rachel C. Hughey, Linhda Nguyen

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

No Copyright In The Law: A Basic Principle, Yet A Continuing Battle, Elizabeth Scheibel

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Make America Innovate Again: Construing Patent Box Proposals In View Of A Policy Mix Approach, Adam E. Szymanski

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Probating Prince’S Estate: Who Will End Up With The Singer’S Substantial Intellectual Property?, J. Gordon Hylton

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Centering Education In The Next Great Copyright Act: A Response To Professor Jaszi, Deidre Keller

Journal Publications

Rather, as the Georgia State decisions exemplify, educators and educational institutions are treated like every other unlicensed user of copyrighted materials; they are expected to prove that each use is a fair use firmly within the confines of existing fair use jurisprudence. Jaszi further asserts that endeavoring to change the copy-right statute is a lost cause and offers, as the least bad alternative, the possibility of educators articulating their uses as transformative and, therefore, well within the recognized parameters of the fair use doctrine. This piece responds to Professor Jaszi’s article. Part II briefly analyzes the Georgia State decisions out …

Masthead, Volume7 Issue 1

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

“It’S Been A Hard Day’S Night” For Songwriters: Why The Ascap And Bmi Consent Decrees Must Undergo Reform, Brontë Lawson Turk

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

In order to guarantee reasonable fees for songwriters, composers, and publishers, the consent decrees must undergo critical reform to account for how music is licensed in new media. Part I of this Note will provide background on the mechanics of music licensing, both traditional and through modern mediums, in order to explain why the two largest PROs initially entered into governmental consent decrees. Part II will discuss recent judicial determinations of “reasonable” licensing rates for public performances in new media and demonstrate the discrepancy in compensation between songwriters and their sound recording counterparts, namely record companies and recording artists. Finally, …

Newsgathering Takes Flight In Choppy Skies: Legal Obstacles Affecting Journalistic Drone Use, Clay Calvert, Charles D. Tobin, Matthew D. Bunker

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

This Article examines legal challenges confronting journalists who use drones to gather images. Initially, it traces the history of drones and the Federal Aviation Administration’s efforts to regulate them, as well as new state legislation that aims to restrict drones. This Article then illustrates that a wide array of legal remedies already exist for individuals harmed by journalistic drone usage, and it argues that calls for additional, piecemeal state laws to regulate drones are unnecessary and unduly hinder First Amendment interests in newsgathering and the public’s right to know. Furthermore, this Article asserts that the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy jurisprudence developed in aerial …

Content Providers’ Secondary Liability: A Social Network Perspective, Michal Lavi

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Recent technological developments allow Internet users to disseminate ideas to a large audience. These technological advances empower individuals and promote important social objectives. However, they also create a setting for speech-related torts, harm, and abuse. One legal path to deal with online defamation turns to the liability of online content providers who facilitate the harmful exchanges. The possibility of bringing them to remove defamatory content and collecting damages from them attracted a great deal of attention in scholarly work, court decisions, and regulations. Different countries established different legal regimes. The United States allows an extensive shield—an overall immunity, as it …

The Need For "Supreme" Clarity: Clothing, Copyright, And Conceptual Separability, Jacqueline Lefebvre

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

For the first time in history, the U.S. Supreme Court will address copyright protection in the context of apparel in the case Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc. This case tackles arguably the most vexing, unresolved question in copyright law: How to determine whether artistic features of a useful article—such as a garment or piece of furniture—are conceptually separable from the article and thus protectable. Indeed, this case comes more than sixty years after Mazer v. Stein, the Supreme Court’s first and,until this date, only decision in this area. A lack of clear guidance from the Supreme Court and …

Case Ip Law News, Case Western Reserve University School Of Law, The Spangenberg Center For Law, Technology & The Arts

Case IP Law News

Vol. 3, #1

• Alumnus lands dream job with sports agency for LeBron James
• Rising 3L Justin Dillon trades guitar for entertainment law career
• Donor Recognized for Support to Create New IP Venture Clinic Suite
• WIPO Lab analyzes case studies on herbs, fruit, yoga
• Meet Deepa Mishra, first graduate of the Masters in Patent Practice program
• Students experience the legal side of sports and entertainment through Great Lakes Law Academy
• From Idea to Commercialization: About the IP Venture Clinic
• Prof. Craig Nard’s articles among most-cited
• Native American Tribes’ & Nations’ Rights to their IP explored during Spangenberg-sponsored lectures
• Faculty Updates

Sieger Suarez Architectural Partnership, Inc. V. Arquitectonica International Corp., Elizabeth Stevens

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Roger Blair And Intellectual Property, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Although intellectual property is just a sidelight of Roger Blair's work, he has published at least seven articles and coauthored a book on this subject. Blair's work sets out robust economic models that address nearly all of the significant economic issues in intellectual property. Moreover, by using the property rules framework, he has offered a useful counterweight to the reward-to-loss theory that dominates the literature.

Inefficiently Automated Law Enforcement, Woodrow Hartzog, Gregory Conti, John Nelson, Lisa A. Shay

Faculty Scholarship

For some crimes the entire law enforcement process can now be automated. No humans are needed to detect the crime, identify the perpetrator, or impose punishment. While automated systems are cheap and efficient, governments and citizens must look beyond these obvious savings as manual labor is replaced by robots and computers. Inefficiency and indeterminacy have significant value in automated law enforcement systems and should be preserved. Humans are inefficient, yet more capable of ethical and contextualized decision-making than automated systems. Inefficiency is also an effective safeguard against perfectly enforcing laws that were created with implicit assumptions of leniency and discretion. …

The Limits Of Statutory Interpretation: Towards Explicit Engagement, By The Supreme Court Of Canada, With The Charter Right To Freedom Of Expression In The Context Of Copyright, Graham Reynolds

All Faculty Publications

In its post-2002 copyright jurisprudence, the Supreme Court of Canada has clarified that the Copyright Act grants a significant degree of latitude to non-copyright owning parties to express themselves using copyrighted works. This outcome is attributable neither to the SCC having interpreted provisions of the Copyright Act according to Charter values nor to the SCC having weighed provisions of the Copyright Act against the section 2(b) right to freedom of expression. Rather, it has resulted from the SCC interpreting provisions of the Copyright Act through the lens of the purpose of copyright, as re-articulated by the SCC. The author argues …

The Patentability Of Digital "Manufactures" As 3d Printing Expands Into The 4d World, Laura E. Powell

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Technological advances have always been supported by a robust patent system that encourages disclosure of inventions by providing protection to the inventor. Society has benefitted from this system, which has relied on a definition of "manufacture" that has essentially remained unchanged for over 200 years. However, with the advent of digital technologies, and in particular Four-Dimensional Printing, courts have been inconsistent in evaluating the patentability of such inventions. Recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions have indicated that some software may be eligible for patent protection. This is particularly important for 4D printing wherein the manifestation of the printed product …

Beyond Eureka: What Creators Want (Freedom, Credit, And Audiences) And How Intellectual Property Can Better Give It To Them (By Supporting, Sharing, Licensing, And Attribution), Colleen Chien

Michigan Law Review

In the theater of the courtroom or the rough and tumble arena of intellectual property policymaking, the day-to-day lives of creators are rarely presented. We often instead see one-dimensional vignettes, for example, “the new artist or band that has just released their [sic] first single and will not be paid for its success,” described on Taylor Swift’s Tumblr last summer when she initially withdrew from Apple’s music streaming service. While instructive, this description leaves out that Swift and other artists have long relied on “free play” mediums like radio and, more recently, YouTube to develop, not cannibalize, their audiences and …

The Supreme Assimilation Of Patent Law, Peter Lee

Michigan Law Review

Although tensions between universality and exceptionalism apply throughout law, they are particularly pronounced in patent law, a field that deals with highly technical subject matter. This Article explores these tensions by investigating an underappreciated descriptive theory of Supreme Court patent jurisprudence. Significantly extending previous scholarship, it argues that the Court’s recent decisions reflect a project of eliminating “patent exceptionalism” and assimilating patent doctrine to general legal principles (or, more precisely, to what the Court frames as general legal principles). Among other motivations, this trend responds to rather exceptional patent doctrine emanating from the Federal Circuit in areas as varied as …

The Objectives And Principles Of The Wto Trips Agreement: A Detailed Anatomy, Alison Slade

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Article 7 (Principles) and Article 8 (Objectives) are prominent within the text of the WTO TRIPS Agreement, yet have figured sparingly in the reasoning of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). This discrepancy is accentuated when considered in light of three key factors. First, the pioneering step taken by TRIPS negotiators to include broad declarations of intent within the operative text. Second, the 2001 reinforcement given to these provisions in the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. Finally, the verbatim replication of these provisions within other international IP instruments, notably, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the WIPO …

The End Of Ownership: Personal Property In The Digital Economy, Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

Books

An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that …

Abercrombie 2.0 - Can We Get There From Here? The Thoughts On 'Suggestive Fair Use', Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

Professor Linford, unlike Caesar’s Antony, seeks not only to bury Abercrombie, but to praise it, at least in part. Using linguistic evidence, both historical and experimental, he would relocate a bobbled boundary—from the descriptive–suggestive transition to the suggestive–arbitrary transition—and thereby establish a reformed template for sorting word marks according to their source-signifying strength. The basic difference between acquired and inherent distinctiveness not only remains in Linford’s account, however; it draws new strength from insights about semantic change. Behold, Abercrombie 2.0! His recent article, which is both provocative and engaging, continues the reconstructive work Linford began in his critique of …

Discouraging Frivolous Copyright Infringement Claims: Fee Shifting Under Rule 11 Or 28 U.S.C. § 1927 As An Alternative To Awarding Attorney's Fees Under Section 505 Of The Copyright Act, David E. Shipley

Scholarly Works

The United States Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons resolved a disagreement over when it is appropriate to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant under section 505 of the Copyright Act, and ended a perceived venue advantage for losing plaintiffs in some jurisdictions. The Court ruled unanimously that courts are correct to give substantial weight to the question of whether the losing side had a reasonable case to fight, but that the objective reasonableness of that side’s position does not give rise to a presumption against fee shifting. It made clear that other factors …

Scope, Mark P. Mckenna, Mark A. Lemley

Journal Articles

Virtually every significant legal doctrine in IP is either about whether the plaintiff has a valid IP right that the law will recognize (validity); whether the defendant's conduct violates that right (infringement); or whether the defendant is somehow privileged to violate that right (defenses). IP regimes tend to separate doctrines in these three legal categories relatively strictly. They apply different burdens of proof and persuasion to infringement and validity. In many cases they ask different actors to decide one doctrine but not the other. And even where none of that is true, the nature of IP law is to categorize …

How Should The Law Think About Robots?, Neil M. Richards, William D. Smart

Scholarship@WashULaw

The robots are coming. We don’t mean this in a scary, apocalyptic way, like in The Terminator or Battlestar Galactica, or in a tongue-in-cheek way, like in the Flight of the Conchords song “The Humans are Dead.” What we mean is this: Robots and robotic technologies are now mature enough to leave the research lab and come to the consumer market in large numbers. These early technologies are just the start, and we might soon be witnessing a personal robotics revolution. These systems have the potential to revolutionize our daily lives and to transform our world in ways even more …

Volume 7 Issue 1 (2016), Case Western Reserve Journal Of Law, Technology & The Internet

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

When Real People Become Fictional: The Collision Of Trademark, Copyright, And Publicity Rights In Online Stories About Celebrities, Stacey M. Lantagne

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

"Fanficion is frequently defined as the writing of fiction involving the characters or setting of someone else’s creation. However, there is a subset of fanfiction that is known as Real Person Fiction, or RPF. This subset writes stories not about other people’s fictional creations but about real people, whether they be hockey players or movie stars, and it has long been the scene of heated debate in the fan community. Some fans who readily and enthusiastically engage with fanfiction draw strict “squick” lines about RPF and call it “creepy” and “disturbing.” "Perhaps for this reason, scholars have paid little attention …

The Uncoordinated Public Domain, Robert Spoo

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

When nations amend their copyright laws in response to calls for international harmonization, they usually expand authors' rights without also seeking to harmonize national public domains. Divergent national copyright laws have resulted in an uncoordinated global public domain that renders authors' works freely available for use in some countries while subjecting them to copyright or moral-rights protection in others. While the fragmented global commons thwarts many valuable uses of cultural resources, it has especially deleterious effects on the ability of researchers to access, copy, and disseminate historical and literary materials, many of which remain unpublished. These effects are mirrored and …

Panel 1: Policy Considerations & Industry Perspectives On 3d Printing, Greg Boyd, Martin Galese, John Knapp, Natalia Krasnodebska, Michael Weinberg, Aaron Wright

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Copyright’S Constitutionality, Graham J. Reynolds

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In 1996, in Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin – Michelin & Cie v National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers Union of Canada (CAW-Canada) [Michelin], Justice Teitelbaum of the Federal Court (Trial Division) held both that specific provisions of the Copyright Act did not infringe the right to freedom of expression as protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that, even if they did, these provisions could be justified under s 1 of the Charter. Since Michelin, these conclusions have been treated by Canadian courts as settled. The purpose of this paper is to challenge these conclusions …