Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Ip Law Post-Brexit, Graeme Dinwoodie, Richard Arnold, Lionel Bently, Estelle Derclaye

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Negotiating Ip's Boundaries In An Evolving World, Stephen Yelderman

Notre Dame Law Review

The common element of the articles that make up this Symposium Issue is a refusal to dismiss difficult questions with mechanical formality, to paper over the wrinkles that emerge when the simple models that function in the middle flounder at the edge. As this Symposium Issue will show, those wrinkles have a lot to tell us.

Trademarks And Digital Goods, Mark P. Mckenna, Lucas S. Osborn

Notre Dame Law Review

This article argues that the question of whether we should treat digital files as relevant goods is irreducibly one of policy, and it should not be reduced to mere formalism. Digital files should be treated as goods only when consumers’ interactions with the files sufficiently resemble their interactions with physical goods that they warrant the same treatment. In particular, this article argues that digital files should be treated as goods only when the origin of the files as such (not the content of those files) is material to consumers. That may turn out to be relatively rare. Indeed, this article …

Strategies For Discerning The Boundaries Of Copyright And Patent Protections, Pamela Samuelson

Notre Dame Law Review

When presented with copyright claims as to seemingly ambiguous subject matters, courts and the Copyright Office have developed several different responses. The most common has been a layering or segmentation approach under which courts treat some aspects of an intellectual creation as protectable by copyright law, while other aspects may be protectable, if at all, by utility patents. But five other strategies for determining copyright and utility patent boundaries are evident in the literature, each of which has sought to preserve separate and distinct domains for copyright and utility patent protections.

Raising Walls Against Overlapping Rights: Preemption And The Right Of Publicity, Rebecca Tushnet

Notre Dame Law Review

By comparing how preemption and First Amendment law have used purposive approaches to limit the right of publicity, we can see something about how boundary work in intellectual property law (IP) is done—badly, usually, with justifications that aren’t consistent or that assume that other regimes work differently than they actually do. One improvement would be to embrace categorical approaches, rather than unpredictable case-by-case balancing; both preemption and First Amendment doctrines can lend themselves to this approach. Another improvement would be to think of the First Amendment as an intellectual property regime of its own, one with general preemptive power.

Risk Regulation And Innovation: The Case Of Rights-Encumbered Biomedical Data Silos, Arti K. Rai

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article discusses whether, and how, risk and social regulation can promote socially valuable innovation. The focus is on regulation as a force for creating a data infrastructure for future innovation. This Article briefly summarizes the history of overlapping and adjacent intellectual property rights in biomedical innovation. It then discusses the manner in which the Supreme Court’s reaction to such rights concentration may exacerbate legally-encumbered diagnostic data silos. It will go on to outlines the basic history of biopharmaceutical trial data silos as well as the core legal and policy arguments in favor of increasing access to the aggregated data …

Territorial Overlaps In Trademark Law: The Evolving European Model, Graeme B. Dinwoodie

Notre Dame Law Review

Courts in the European Union have in a number of recent cases resisted some of the innovations of the EU system and have affirmed the enduring pull of a different conception of territoriality. This Article defends many of these acts of resistance, and supports further modifications of the EU model, in part because of the increased problem of overlapping rights. That increased overlap requires a critical reading of these innovative mechanisms and attention to a broader range of values in implementing the model. These propositions are supported both by a more theoretically complex conception of trademark territoriality and a richer …

The Demise Of The Functionality Doctrine In Design Patent Law, Perry J. Saidman

Notre Dame Law Review

The doctrine of functionality, in both the validity and infringement contexts, has outlived its usefulness, and analyzing it is a waste of litigants’ and judicial resources.

Spill Your (Trade) Secrets: Knowledge Networks As Innovation Drivers, Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña

Notre Dame Law Review

Theories of intellectual property take the individual inventor or the firm as the unit of innovation. But studies in economic sociology show that in complex fields where knowledge is rapidly advancing and widely dispersed among different firms, the locus of innovation is neither an individual nor a single firm. Rather, innovative ideas originate in the informal networks of learning and collaboration that cut across firms.

Understanding innovation in this subset of industries as emerging out of networks of informal information-sharing across firms challenges traditional utilitarian theories of trade secret law—which assume trade secret protection is needed to prevent excessive private, …

Expired Patents, Trade Secrets, And Stymied Competition, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Notre Dame Law Review

Patents and trade secrecy have long been considered substitute incentives for innovation. When inventors create a new invention, they traditionally must choose between the two. And if inventors choose to patent their invention, society provides strong legal protection in exchange for disclosure, with the understanding that the protection has a limit: it expires twenty years from the date of filing. At that time, the invention is opened to the public and exposed to competition.

This story is incomplete. Patent disclosure is weak and focuses on one technical piece of an invention—but that piece is often only a part of the …

Boundaries, Extraterritoriality, And Patent Infringement Damages, Timothy R. Holbrook

Notre Dame Law Review

Patents are generally considered to be the most territorial of all the various forms of intellectual property. Even patent law, however, has confronted issues involving the application of a U.S. patent to extraterritorial activity. The Supreme Court has expressed an interest in both issues – the extraterritorial application of U.S. law and patent law. At times, these interests have intersected. Notwithstanding the Court’s recent elaborations on extraterritoriality, the approach by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has been, at best, inconsistent. At times the court has afforded extraterritorial protection, even in the face of strong territorial language …

Did Ebay Irreparably Injure Trademark Law?, Mark A. Lemley

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article argues that, while the Supreme Court's holding in eBay v. MercExchange was a good—indeed, great—development in patent and copyright law, trademark is different. The purposes of trademark law—and whom it benefits—should lead us to treat trademark injunctions differently than patent and copyright injunctions. Further, trademark courts have misinterpreted eBay, treating each of the four factors the Court enumerated as a requirement rather than a consideration. That is a particular problem in trademark law, where proof of future injury can be elusive. And perhaps most remarkably, courts have expanded eBay in trademark cases at the same time they have …

The Anti-Suit Injunction - A Transnational Remedy For Multi-Jurisdictional Sep Litigation, Jorge L. Contreras, Michael A. Eixenberger

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Litigation concerning standards-essential patents (SEPs) has become increasingly global, with parallel litigation occurring over the same issues in multiple jurisdictions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. As a result, litigants have sought mechanisms to coordinate these actions both to manage costs and to avoid inconsistent and incompatible results. One little-known procedural mechanism that has long been available to manage multi-jurisdictional litigation, and which is growing in popularity in SEP disputes, is the anti-suit injunction.

An anti-suit injunction is an interlocutory remedy issued by a court in one jurisdiction which prohibits a litigant from initiating or continuing parallel litigation in another …

Samsung V. Apple: Taking A Bite Out Of The Design Patent “Article Of Manufacture” Controversy, Elizabeth M. Gil

University of Miami Business Law Review

Smartphones have become a universal item. A smartphone is comprised of hundreds of thousands of patented inventions, many of which are design patents.1It is these design patents that are at the center of the highly-contested case of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. Apple Inc., which involves three of the design patents within Apple’s iPhone. Beginning in 2011, Apple and Samsung have been in a seemingly never-ending litigious battle over these design patents with the case commencing in the district court, climbing up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and returning to the district court. It is this …

Workshop Agenda, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Ne, July 12, 2017 (2017 Nebraska Acrl Scholarly Communication Roadshow, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln), Joy Kirchner, William Cross

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Scholarly communication: From understanding to engagement. Agenda for the day. 2017 Nebraska ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) Scholarly Communication Roadshow, July 12, 2017, 8:00 am - 4:30 pm CDT, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jackie Gaughan Multicultural Center, Unity Room.

Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies, Cni Executive Roundtable, Clifford Lynch

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

At the spring 2017 CNI meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we held an Executive Roundtable on the topic of Rethinking Institutional Repository Strategies. We knew this was a timely topic for many of our member institutions, and we anticipated that many CNI member institutions would seek to attend this roundtable. To meet the demand, we offered two sessions of the roundtable (with different institutions participating in each) on sequential days, and even then had to turn away many who expressed interest. At the main CNI meeting, CNI’s executive director Clifford Lynch offered a summary of the roundtables during one of …

Deceptive Patents: Deconstructing Juicy Whip, Paul Spiel

BYU Law Review

Moral utility largely prevents the granting of a patent if the patent would be injurious to the well-being of society. The moral utility doctrine has prevailed through much of American patent history and still endures in many parts of the world. In Juicy Whip I, the Federal Circuit chose to abandon the doctrine, but the court’s rationale in support of the decision was ill-suited. The court’s holding sanctioned deceptive patent applications but, intentionally or unintentionally, neglected applicable unfair competition, free speech, and consumer deception doctrines. In light of the Intellectual Property Clause of the U.S. Constitution, deceptive patents should be …

Who Will Protect The Consumers Of Trademarked Goods?, James Astrachan

University of Baltimore Law Review

Federal and state law recognizes multiple forms of intellectual property, including patents,1 copyrights,2 trademarks,3 and trade secrets.4 Alleged violations of patents and copyrights are required by statute to be litigated in the federal courts.5 Trademark rights can arise under the Federal Lanham Act6 or state law.7 Trademark infringement can be litigated in state or federal courts.8 Trade secrets arising under state statutes are litigated in state courts unless diversity jurisdiction exists and is pled.9

Infringement of intellectual property in the case of patents arises when a patented invention is used, manufactured or imported into the United States without authority of …

Towards An Effective Regime Against Online Copyright Infringement In India, Ashwin Ramakrishnan

LLM Theses

With Internet usage on the rise, it is important for India to establish an effective regulatory regime to combat piracy and mass copyright infringement online. This thesis argues that, in the face of unique legal and cultural challenges specific to India, present laws in the country have failed to do so. Unless and until these challenges are met it will be difficult to have an effective mechanism that deals with online copyright infringement. Countries like the United States, Canada, Ireland, and France have all adopted different regulatory models. However, this thesis argues that each not only have significant limitations on …

Uncovering The Confusing Influence Experts Have On Music Copyright Cases, Arata-Enrique Kaku

Honors Projects

Contemporary copyright decisions by Federal Courts perplex composers; am I the creative composer, or am I an infringer on someone else’s intellectual property? By forming a temporary monopoly to monetize new content, copyright protection incentivizes artists to be fruitful. In a creative field like music, an overly broad definition of copyrightable expression can lead to a “chilling effect” on creativity. This chilling effect is exacerbated by the great latitude given expert witnesses to claim infringement based on broad classifications of expressions. My paper addresses the question: To what extent should expert witnesses be probative when they extend ownership rights beyond …

Transformative Use In Software, Clark D. Asay

Faculty Scholarship

Fair use is copyright law’s most important defense against claims of copyright infringement. It provides courts with an equitable tool for allowing parties to use the copyrighted materials of others without liability when doing so facilitates copyright’s constitutional purpose of promoting the “progress of Science and the useful Arts.”

When analyzing fair use, modern courts place great emphasis on whether the purportedly fair use involves a “transformative use” of the copyrighted materials. In what some are calling the most important software copyright case in decades, a jury recently handed Google a victory by concluding that Google’s reuse of some of …

The Problem Of Creative Collaboration, Anthony J. Casey, Andres Sawicki

William & Mary Law Review

In this Article, we explore a central problem facing creative industries: how to organize collaborative creative production. We argue that informal rules are a significant and pervasive—but nonetheless underappreciated—tool for solving the problem. While existing literature has focused on how informal rules sustain incentives for producing creative work, we demonstrate how such rules can facilitate and organize collaboration in the creative space.

We also suggest that informal rules can be a better fit for creative organization than formal law. On the one side, unique features of creativity, especially high uncertainty and low verifiability, lead to organizational challenges that formal law …

The Rcep And Trans-Pacific Intellectual Property Norms, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In the past few years, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has garnered considerable media, policy and scholarly attention. Rarely analyzed and only occasionally mentioned is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This agreement is currently being negotiated between Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Launched in November 2012 under the ASEAN 6 framework, the RCEP negotiations built on past trade and non-trade discussions between ASEAN and its six major Asia-Pacific neighbors.

This article examines the RCEP with a focus on the intellectual property norms that it seeks to …

Looking Backward, Moving Forward: What Must Be Remembered When Resolving The Right To Be Forgotten, Katherine Stewart

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

In May 2014, the European Court of Justice decided Google Spain v. AEPD and González and granted citizens the right to be forgotten, rather, the right to request any search engine offering services to European consumers to remove certain results displayed after a search of a citizen’s name. This decision has also resulted in an ongoing battle between Google and the Commission Nationale de l’Infomatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority. The CNIL believes that Google must apply the right to be forgotten to all domains worldwide, including Google.com. Google, however, has been reluctant to do so, given …

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: A Need For China To Further Amend Its 2013 Trademark Law In Order To Prevent Trademark Squatting, Jessica Martin

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This Note examines the effect that China’s 2013 Trademark Law amendments have had on curtailing the trademark squatting problem that plagues foreign corporations and individuals attempting to register a trademark in China. Trademarks play a crucial role in establishing brand recognition in an individual or a company’s product. Given China’s large and growing population of potential consumers, obtaining a Chinese trademark is especially valuable. Chinese trademark squatters, however, make this difficult for foreign corporations and individuals by filing for registration in China once the mark gains popularity, not intending to use the trademark in commerce, but to hold it as …

Reading Together And Apart: Juries, Courts, And Substantial Similarity In Copyright Law, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Technology Transfer In Indonesian State Universities: Do Iprs Play A Significant Role?, Puspa Kriselina Asmoro

Indonesia Law Review

The activity of knowledge and technology transfer from the academic side into businesses or the industrial sector through various schemes, so-called university technology transfer or academic technology transfer, involves a complex process of developing research ideas into the utilization of research. Historically, university technology transfer was triggered by amendment of the U.S. Patent Law, named the Bayh-Dole Act. Shortly after the amendment, technology transfer activity at U.S. universities escalated, particularly in patent and license activities. The movement of transfer technology was closed related to a research activity of the university and university patent in general. Through empirical study, this paper …

The Development Of Asean's Intellectual Property Rights Law, From Trips Compliance To Harmonization, Nurul Barizah

Indonesia Law Review

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is one of the most important subjects of trading, not only in the era of globalism, but also in this era of regionalism. In the regional ASEAN, its significant of IPR protection has made Member Nations introduced ASEAN Framework Agreement on Intellectual Property (IP) Cooperation in 1995, a year after the conclusion of the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This paper discusses the current development of this Framework in the light to harmonise Intellectual Property (IP) laws in the region, covering the objectives, the basic principles, and …

New Copyright Law And Its Implications, John A. Liekweg

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Modifying Amateurism: A Performance-Based Solution To Compensating Student–Athletes For Licensing Their Names, Images, And Likenesses, Chaz Gross

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Amateurism is evolving and the NCAA is paying for it. With the NCAA’s focus set on preserving amateurism, it prohibited student–athlete compensation for any activity related to sports. However, college athletics are a lucrative business that generates its primary revenue from licensing Division I men’s basketball and FBS football players’ names, images, and likenesses. After years of criticism for its rules and regulations, the NCAA faced antitrust scrutiny from both former and current student–athletes. In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the NCAA’s restrictions on student–athlete compensation violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. While the …