Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Razing The Patent Bar, William Hubbard

All Faculty Scholarship

Innovation is vital to economic prosperity, and lawmakers consequently strive to craft patent laws that efficiently promote the discovery and commercialization of new inventions. Commentators have long recognized that legal fees are a significant cost affecting innovation, but remarkably a crucial driver of these costs has largely escaped scrutiny: the Patent Bar. Every year innovators spend billions of dollars on legalfees for representation in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO"), where inventors apply for patents and potential infringers seek to invalidate issued patents. Supply in this essential legal services market, however, is sharply limited because patent law requires innovators …

National Disparities And Standards-Essential Patents: Considerations For India, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Patents on standardized technologies are being issued with increasing frequency, and the majority of these patents are held by large multinational firms based in developed economies. As a result, firms from less-developed economies with sparse patent holdings are disadvantaged in both domestic and foreign markets. While protectionist governmental policies can address these disparities, such measures are potentially contrary to international treaty obligations and generally unsuccessful in the long term. An alternative approach involves greater participation in international SSOs by firms from less-developed economies. This increased participation is likely to benefit such firms both in terms of technology development, strengthening of …

Moral Judgments In Trademark Law, Ned Snow

American University Law Review

Under the federal Lanham Act, eligibility for trademark protection depends on whether a mark is sufficiently moral. The Federal Circuit has recently held this provision of the Act to be unconstitutional based on its interpretation of speech doctrine. The context of trademark law, however, refutes this interpretation. Indeed, speech doctrine appears to support this morality requirement. Nevertheless, there seems to be another reason that the Federal Circuit held the morality requirement unconstitutional: the judicial discomfort with morality serving as a basis for law. This Essay concludes that this judicial discomfort is unjustified in this instance. From both a constitutional and …

The Supreme Court’S Devaluation Of U.S. Patents, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

In a span of three weeks during the spring of 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court issued three patent decisions, bringing the total number of patent decisions for the 2016-2017 term to six. This means that the October 2016 term ties the previous record of six patent decisions in the October 2014 term. This represents a tremendous increase in the number of patent decisions compared to earlier times, and particularly the early days of the Federal Circuit. For reference, during the first quarter of a century the Federal Circuit was in existence, the Supreme Court heard on average less than one …

#Ncaa Vs. Student Athletes: An Empirical Analysis Of Ncaa Social Media Policies, Elizabeth M. Heintzelman

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This article argues that the NCAA and its universities should not have any form of social media policy as it creates First and Fourth Amendment violations, as well as a liability for both the NCAA and its member schools. A social media policy should not limit constitutional rights, but rather any policy should educate the youth about important issues such as cyber-bullying, versus limiting constitutional rights. This article will focus on several issues: 1) whether the relationship between the NCAA and its student athletes constitutes an employer-employee relationship; 2) an evaluation of the social media policies concerning private employers and …

Can I Play Too? Transgender Student Athletes’ Inclusion In “Because Of Sex”, Paul Jones

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This article seeks to explore what remedies may be available to transgender student athletes in today's changing legal field. The law is scant as to whether transgender student athletes must be allowed to play on the sex-segregated teams which correspond with their gender identity. New legislation may not be needed. Title VII and Title IX may offer protections for transgender student athletes. The legislative and judicial tools already exist.

Several federal courts have included gender identity under Title VII, yet Title VII currently only protects people who are considered to be employees. There is now a movement across college campuses …

Charitable Trademarks, Leah Chan Grinvald

Scholarly Works

Charity is big business in the United States. In 2015, private individuals or entities donated over $350 billion, which accounted for approximately two percent of the gross domestic product in the United States. Even though this seems like big money, these donations were split among over 1.5 million organizations. And each year, the number of charitable organizations grows and therefore, the competition for public donations increases. In part to succeed in such competition, some charitable organizations have turned to branding and trademarks as a way to differentiate their entities and to encourage donations. Drawing from the for-profit branding and trademarking …

Patent Working Requirements: Historical And Comparative Perspectives, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

At the beginning of the 20th century, commentators referred to patent working requirements as the most contentious contemporary concept in patent law, and working requirements were at the center of discussions about revisions to the Paris Convention. By the end of the 20th century it seemed that working requirements attracted less attention; the TRIPS Agreement did not expressly mention working requirements at all. However, some TRIPS provisions do arguably relate to such requirements; in fact, some commentators believe that the TRIPS Agreement prevents countries from maintaining such requirements, at least in some forms. Although the lack of interest in working …

U.S. State Copyright Laws: Challenge And Potential, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

With copyright law in the United States lying primarily in the realm of federal law, the laws of the U.S. states concerning copyright do not typically attract significant attention from scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. Some recent events have drawn attention to state copyright laws – for example, litigation against a satellite radio provider for infringement of state common-law public performance rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. However, in general, state copyright laws remain largely in the shadow of federal copyright law, and state law is typically not viewed as a particularly useful vehicle for pursuing the policies that copyright law …

Understanding The Defend Trade Secrets Act (Dtsa): The Federalization Of Trade Secrecy, David Green, James Pooley, Elizabeth Rowe, Ryan Calo

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Zombie Patents And Zombie Companies With Patents, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

While a zombie is the undead and has no expiration, patents do. A patent comes into existence the moment the government, through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), examines the invention application and issues a grant of patent. From that birth, a patent will have a lifetime of only twenty years from the date of filing the application. Patents expire and have no life after the twenty-year period.

Some patents die when the patentees abandon them by not paying maintenance fees. Dead patents must remain dead and become part of the public domain. Unfortunately, this Essay observes that …

A Transactional Theory Of The Reader In Copyright Law, Zahr K. Said

Articles

Copyright doctrine requires judges and juries to engage in some form of experiencing or “reading” artistic works to determine whether these works have been infringed. Despite the central role that this reading—or viewing, or listening—plays in copyright disputes, copyright law lacks a robust theory of reading, and of the proper role for the “reader.” Reading matters in copyright cases, first, because many courts rely on the “ordinary observer” standard to determine infringement, which requires figuring out or assuming how an ordinary observer would read the works at issue. Second, most courts characterize a key part of infringement analysis as a …

Retooling The Intellectual Property-Antitrust Intersection: Insights From Behavioral Economics, 69 Baylor L. Rev. 124 (2017), Daryl Lim

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that courts should operationalize insights offered by behavioral economics in developing jurisprudence at the patent-antitrust interface.

I Dissent: The Federal Circuit’S “Great Dissenter,” Her Influence On The Patent Dialogue, And Why It Matters, 19 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. 873 (2017), Daryl Lim

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first study to comprehensively explore the centrality of the patent dialogue at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation’s principal patent court from empirical, doctrinal, and policy perspectives. It offers several insights into how the Federal Circuit reaches consensus and when it does not, serving as a window into its inner workings, a reference to academics, judges, and attorneys alike. More broadly, this Article provides a template to study the “legal dialogue” of other judges at the Federal Circuit, those in other Circuits, as well as those in other areas of the law. …

Private Or Public Right? Who Should Adjudicate Patentability Disputes And Is The Current Scheme Really Constitutional?, Jasmyne M. Baynard

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

“The patent bargain is the foundation upon which the patent system is built: in exchange for protections for an invention, the inventor agrees to make public their inventions so that others may build upon it.” The patent bargain creates a presumption of protection for the inventors, yet categorizing the patent a public right or a private right has diminished expectations for inventors and confusion for the masses. On October 11, 2016, the Supreme Court denied two petitions for writ of certiorari that challenged the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Review Board proceedings on the basis of the patent owner’s Seventh …

The Dtsa’S Federalism Problem: Federal Court Jurisdiction Over Trade Secrets, Conor Tucker

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (“DTSA”) greatly expanded federal protection of trade secrets. But how many trade secrets were “federalized”? The short answer is: many, but not all. At the heart of the DTSA lies a mammoth jurisdictional problem: Congress only federalized certain trade secrets. Unlike copyrights and patents, Congress has no independent constitutional basis to regulate trade secrets. Instead, like trademarks, trade secrets are regulated under the commerce clause and must satisfy a jurisdictional element, which requires a nexus between interstate commerce and trade secrets. But unlike trademarks, Congress chose not to legislate to the fullest extent …

Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter o􀁼ers an overview of copyright in general in common law and civil law countries, with an emphasis on the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). It addresses the history and philosophies of copyright (authors’ right), subject matter of copyright (including the requirement of 􀁿xation and the exclusion of “ideas”), formalities, initial ownership and transfers of title, duration, exclusive moral and economic rights (including reproduction, adaptation, public performance and communication and making available to the public, distribution and exhaustion of the distribution right), exceptions and limitations (including fair use), and remedies. It also covers the liability of …

The Court Of Justice Of The European Union Creates An Eu Law Of Liability For Facilitation Of Copyright Infringement: Observations On Brein V. Filmspeler [C-527/15] (2017) And Brein V. Ziggo [C-610/15] (2017), Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

After a series of decisions in which the Court of Justice of the European Union appeared to be cutting back on the application of the right of communication to the public with respect to the provision of hyperlinks, the Court’s most recent decisions in Brein v. Filmspeler (C-527/15) and Brein v. Ziggo (C-610/15) concerning, respectively, sale of a device pre-loaded with hyperlinks to illegal streaming sites, and The Pirate Bay BitTorrent platform, indicate instead that the Court’s prior caselaw was in fact gradually advancing toward a European harmonization of the law on derivative liability (i.e., liability in the second degree) …

Finding And Using Images, While Respecting Copyright, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

Text plays a central role in nearly every lawyer’s life. From cases to codes to contracts, words matter tremendously. At times, words alone are insufficient. A well-selected image can evoke emotion and attract attention. While there are literally millions of images online available for use without cost, a well sourced and properly referenced image should recognize and respect the creator’s intellectual property rights. Here are tips for finding and using images, while respecting copyright.

Fair Use And Fair Dealing: Two Approaches To Limitations And Exceptions In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, David Nimmer

Faculty Scholarship

Premised on realizing a balance between protection and access, ‘limitations and exceptions’ play an important role in the any copyright system. Jurisdictions around the world are generally thought to adopt one of two possible approaches to structuring limitations and exceptions: (a) the fair dealing approach, which delineates highly specific and carefully-worded exceptions with little room for judicial discretion, and (b) the fair use approach, which relies on more open-ended language and its contextual tailoring by courts. This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of these two approaches using the Indian and US copyright systems as its focus. It shows that, although …

‘Courts Have Twisted Themselves Into Knots’ (And The Twisted Knots Remain To Untangle): Us Copyright Protection For Applied Art After Star Athletica, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Domestic and international law makers have struggled to determine whether, and to what extent, copyright law should cover works that are both artistic and functional. American courts' application of a statutory “separability” standard has become so convoluted that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided an appeal from a case in which the appellate court expressed the lament quoted in the title of this Chapter. The Chapter will review the genesis and application of the statutory standard, especially in the Supreme Court’s decision in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands (2017), and, having concluded that the Supreme Court has failed to untangle …

Whither (Not Wither) Copyleft, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

This article contains an edited version of Professor Eben Moglen’s speech at the SFLC Fall Conference 2016. It explores the topic of Copyleft, enforcement and community engagement from the perspective of one of the key individuals in the rise of Free and Open Source Software from interesting idea to a central pillar of the global technology industry.

The Immanent Rationality Of Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Why does copyright treat certain kinds of copying as legally actionable? For nearly a century, American copyright thinking has referenced a core consequentialist dogma to answer this question: incentivizing the production of creative expression at minimal social cost in an effort to further social welfare. This rationale, routinely traced back to the Constitution’s seemingly utilitarian mandate that copyright law should “promote the [p]rogress” of the sciences and useful arts, has come to dominate modern copyright jurisprudence and analysis.2 By classifying specific acts of copying as a wrong, and thereby recognizing a “right to the use of one’s expression,” copyright is …

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other …

Causing Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches to an original work of expression the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible medium. Yet modern copyright law contains no viable mechanism by which to examine whether someone is causally responsible for the creation and fixation of the work. Whenever the issue of causation arises, copyright law relies on its preexisting doctrinal devices to resolve the issue, in the process cloaking its intuitions about causation in altogether extraneous considerations. This Article argues that copyright law embodies an unstated yet distinct theory of authorial causation, which connects the element of human agency to a work …

An Empirical Study Of The Copyright Practices Of American Law Journals, Brian L. Frye, Franklin L. Runge, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article presents an empirical study of the copyright practices of American law journals in relation to copyright ownership and fair use, based on a 24-question survey. It concludes that many American law journals have adopted copyright policies that are inconsistent with the expectations of legal scholars and the scope of copyright protection. Specifically, many law journals have adopted copyright policies that effectively preclude open-access publishing, and unnecessarily limit the fair use of copyrighted works. In addition, it appears that some law journals may not understand their own copyright policies. This article proposes the creation of a Code of Copyright …

Against Creativity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

According to the Supreme Court, copyright requires both independent creation and creativity. The independent creation requirement provides that copyright cannot protect an element of a work of authorship that is copied from a previously existing work. But scholars disagree about the meaning of and justification for the creativity requirement.

The creativity requirement should be abandoned because it is irrelevant to the scope of copyrightable subject matter and distorts copyright doctrine by encouraging inefficient “creativity rhetoric.” The purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of economically valuable works of authorship, not creativity.

The Myth Of Uniformity In Ip Laws, Sharon Sandeen

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress enacts federal laws, it is often because of the asserted benefits of a “uniform” law and the, often unspoken, assumption that federal laws are somehow more uniform than uniform state laws. In fact, the uniformity argument was a primary justification for the enactment of both the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 and the EU Trade Secret Directive.

The quest for uniformity, particularly with respect to laws that relate to intellectual property rights, is an old story in the United States. During the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, the existence of inconsistent state laws was a central reason …

Courtesy Paratexts, Informal Publishing Norms And The Copyright Vacuum In Nineteenth-Century America, Robert Spoo

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

In response to the failure of U.S. copyright law to protect foreign authors, nineteenth-century American publishers evolved an informal practice called the “courtesy of the trade” as a way to mitigate the public goods problem posed by a large and ever-growing commons of foreign works. Trade courtesy was a shared strategy for regulating potentially destructive competition for these free resources, an informal arrangement among publishers to recognize each other’s wholly synthetic exclusive rights in otherwise unprotected writings and to pay foreign authors legally uncompelled remuneration for the resulting American editions. Courtesy was, in effect, a makeshift copyright regime grounded on …

Revising Racial Patents In An Era Of Precision Medicine, Jonathan Kahn

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, I published an article examining the rising use of racial categories in biomedical patents in the aftermath of the successful completion of the Human Genome Project and the production of the first draft of a complete human genome. Ten years on, it now seems time to revisit the issue and consider it in light of the current era of “Precision Medicine” so prominently promoted by President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address where he announced a $215 million proposal for the Precision Medicine Initiative as “a bold new research effort to revolutionize how we improve …