Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Fixing Incontestability: The Next Frontier?, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Incontestability is a nearly unique feature of American trademark law, with a unique American implementation. The concept of incontestability allows a trademark registrant to overcome arguments that a symbol is merely descriptive of features or qualities of the registrant’s goods or services—for example, “Juicy” for apples. Incontestability provides a nearly irrebuttable presumption of trademark meaning, which is a powerful tool for trademark owners. Unfortunately, incontestability is not granted as carefully as its power would counsel. Courts may misunderstand either the prerequisites for, or the meaning of incontestability, allowing trademark claimants to assert rights that they don’t actually have

Incontestability needs …

Information Privacy Litigation As Bellwether For Institutional Change, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Information privacy litigation is controversial and headline-grabbing. New class complaints are filed seemingly every few weeks. Legal scholars vie with one another to articulate more comprehensive theories of harm that such lawsuits might vindicate. Large information businesses and defense counsel bemoan the threats that information privacy litigation poses to corporate bottom lines and to “innovation” more generally. For all that, though, the track record of litigation achievements on the information privacy front is stunningly poor. This essay examines emerging conventions for disposing of information privacy claims, including denial of standing, enforcement of boilerplate waivers, denial of class certification, and the …

Finding A Fair Balance For The Right Of Publicity And First Amendment Protections, Christine Digregorio

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Implications Of A Revitalized 28 U.S.C. 1400(B): Identifying The Regular And Established Place Of Business For Patent Venue In The Internet Age, Steven Pepe, Samuel Brenner

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Runs The Internet?, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is no single answer to the question of who runs the Internet. Is it the United States, often seen as the hegemon of the Internet, home to so many of the world’s leading Internet enterprises? Is it China, which erects a “Great Firewall” to assert control over the portion of the Internet available in China? Is it the European Union, which extends its power globally through its data protection regime, designating countries as “adequate” or (implicitly) “inadequate” to receive its data? Is it ICANN, the California not-for-profit organization that controls how Internet addresses are allocated? Is it the World …

Surgically Precise But Kinematically Abstract Patent Claims, Andrew Chin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theft! A History Of Music, Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Scholarship

Recent Supreme Court cases on patent-eligible subject matter are likely to exacerbate the longstanding problem of biomedical data fragmentation. For each data silo, multiple overlapping legal claims and claimants must be addressed to achieve the benefits of pooling.

Commentators who have discussed the data aggregation challenge have generally focused on possibilities created through public funding, through collective action by research participants, or through pressure by payers. This Article emphasizes the important role of risk regulators, most notably the precedent offered by risk regulation in the area of clinical trial data.

While U.S. risk regulators have taken some positive steps, the …

Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer

Faculty Scholarship

Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has often been perplexing. Much of this difficulty arises from an unclear under-standing of the nature of functionality in fashion design. This Article proposes a robust account of fashion’s function. It argues that aspects of garment designs are functional not only when they affect the physical or technological performance of a garment but also when they affect the perception of the wearer’s body. Generally, clothes are not designed or chosen simply …

Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley

Faculty Scholarship

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and design patents are much easier to obtain than utility patents, and they often last much longer. Accordingly, to prevent claimants from obtaining “backdoor patents,” the other IP doctrines must screen out functionality. As yet, however, courts and scholars have paid little systematic attention to the ways in which these functionality screens operate across and within IP law.

We have four tasks in …

The Nature Of Sequential Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Jon Sprigman

Faculty Scholarship

When creators and innovators take up a new task, they face a world of existing creative works, inventions, and ideas, some of which are governed by intellectual property (IP) rights. This presents a choice: Should the creator pay to license those rights? Or, alternatively, should the creator undertake to innovate around them? Our Article formulates this “build on/build around decision” as the fundamental feature of sequential creativity, and it maps a number of factors—some legal, some contextual—that affect how creators are likely to decide between building on existing IP or building around it. Importantly, creators are influenced by more than …

Forgetting Functionality, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer

Faculty Scholarship

In Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court had an opportunity to clarify copyright law’s treatment of product designs that incorporate functionality. Its opinion failed to do so in a host of different ways. In this comment (as part of the symposium From Shovels to Jerseys: A Guide to Apply Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands), we address just one of the opinion’s shortcomings: its failure to adequately define and distinguish between a design’s functional and expressive features. Not only does the Court’s neglect produce uncertainty for creators, litigants, and judges, the opinion makes it substantially easier …

A Genealogy Of Open Access: Negotiations Between Openness And Access To Research / Une Généalogie De L'Open Access : Négociations Entre L'Ouverture Et L'Accès À La Recherche, Samuel A. Moore

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Open access (OA) is a contested term with a complicated history and a variety of understandings. This rich history is routinely ignored by institutional, funder and governmental policies that instead enclose the concept and promote narrow approaches to OA. This article presents a genealogy of the term open access, focusing on the separate histories that emphasise openness and reusability on the one hand, as borrowed from the open-source software and free culture movements, and accessibility on the other hand, as represented by proponents of institutional and subject repositories. This genealogy is further complicated by the publishing cultures that have evolved …

Ownership Of Intellectual Property In The Library Complex, Patrick Roughen

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In order to broadly explore intellectual property in the context of the library complex, this research examines the patents produced by companies that provide goods and services to libraries, as well as patents associated with international libraries. This paper also surveys the trademarks and copyrights held by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, located in Charlotte, North Carolina. This research suggests ways in which development of intellectual property by U.S. libraries might evolve in the future, with evidence obtained primarily through the searching of online databases.

Promoting Access Over Ownership: Realigning Antitrust And Intellectual Property Law To Usher In An Era Of Collaborative Consumption, Adrian Kuenzler

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Following the US Supreme Court's endorsement of the promotion of consumer welfare as the single goal of antitrust and intellectual property laws, many courts have reasserted their commitment to the market access doctrine for antitrust and intellectual property law liability. These courts have rejected the Court's submission in GTE Sylvania to adhere to a strict output/profitability test concentrating predominantly on the positive and negative welfare effects regarding allegedly infringing conduct. This Article examines several important antitrust and intellectual property law decisions and locates within them a common flaw to express an intelligible, distinct doctrinal function for giving precedence to market …

Copyright Paternalism, Kevin J. Hickey

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The dominant justification for copyright is based on the notion that authors respond rationally to economic incentives. Despite the dominance of this incentive model, many aspects of existing copyright law are best understood as motivated by paternalism. Termination rights permit authors to rescind their own earlier assignments of copyright. The elimination of formalities protects careless authors from forfeitures of copyright if they fail to register the copyright or place appropriate notice on their works. The law limits how copyrights can be transferred, when rights in emerging media can be assigned, and which works can be designated as "made for hire" …

The "Strict Liability" Of Direct Patent Infringement, Lynda J. Oswald

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In 1995, the Federal Circuit summarily attached the label of "strict liability" to direct patent infringement, even though that term does not appear in any US Patent Act enacted in the past two centuries. The catechism of "strict" direct patent infringement liability is now so well engrained in patent doctrine that it is easy to lose sight of how recent the advent of this terminology is in the case law, and how troublesome application of this standard has proven, even to the Federal Circuit, which created it. The first Patent Act (1790) preceded the emergence of tort law as a …

I Dissent: The Federal Circuit's "Great Dissenter," Her Influence On The Patent Dialogue, And Why It Matters, Daryl Lim

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

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. …

Evaluating Market Reactions To Non-Practicing Entity Litigation, Emiliano Giudici, Justin Blount

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

An ongoing debate in patent law involves the role "non-practicing entities," sometimes called "patent trolls," serve in the patent system. Some argue they serve as valuable market intermediaries, while others contend they are a drain on innovation and an impediment to a well-functioning patent system. This Article adds to the data available in this debate by conducting an event study that analyzes the market reaction to patent litigation filed by large "mass aggregator" non-practicing entities against large publicly traded companies. This study advances the literature by attempting to reproduce the results of previous event studies done in this area with …

The Non-Recording, Non-Artist" Recording Artist": Expanding The Recording Artist's Brand Into Non-Music Arenas, Suzanne Kessler

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The changing nature of the music business presents earnings challenges for both record labels and recording artists. Historically, labels and artists entered into recording contracts pursuant to which the artists created music which the labels funded, distributed, marketed, and promoted. Many artists made good livings from music sales, earning dollars per album, while the labels profited even more. However, as digital delivery, especially streaming, now supplants physical records as the primary music consumption manner, the money that labels and artists realize from music sales has significantly decreased. In particular, artists earn fractions of pennies per track streamed. Labels, too, are …

Charting The Contours Of A Copyright Regime Optimized For Engineered Genetic Code, Christopher M. Holman

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privilege For Patent Agents, Megan M. La Belle

Scholarly Articles

Patent agents, in many ways, are unique operators in our legal system. They are not attorneys; yet, they are authorized by Congress to practice law before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). This unusual status raises a host of questions, including whether communications with patent agents should be privileged and, therefore, shielded from discovery. This question has become increasingly important in recent years with the rise of litigation at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)--an administrative tribunal created in 2011 by the America Invents Act (AIA)--where parties can be represented either by a patent attorney or a …

The Value Of Accuracy In The Patent System, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

Because it must rely on imperfect information, the patent system will inevitably make mistakes. To determine how the system ought to err in cases of uncertainty—and whether a given mistake is worth correcting—scholars have composed a simple picture of the consequences of error in either direction. On the one hand, erroneous patent awards impose unjustified costs. On the other hand, erroneous patent denials discourage successful inventors and reduce incentives to create in the future. The result is an essentially indeterminate balancing, in which policies of overly liberal awards drive up costs, and policies of overly cautious awards drive down incentives. …

What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark P. Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman

Journal Articles

Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system. This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of border-drawing that our IP system undertakes — identifying “useful” subject matter.

This aspect is critical because our IP system gives utility patent law pride of place and draws the boundaries of the other doctrines in large part to respect utility patent’s supremacy. Yet IP law’s sense …

The Rcep And Intellectual Property Normsetting In The Asia-Pacific, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Commissioned for the CEIPI-ICTSD Series on Global Perspectives and Challenges for the Intellectual Property System, this article examines the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) with a focus on the intellectual property norms it seeks to develop. It begins by briefly discussing the partnership’s historical origins and ongoing negotiations. It then examines the latest leaked draft of the RCEP intellectual property chapter, highlighting the key provisions concerning copyright and related rights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and undisclosed information, and intellectual property enforcement. This article concludes by exploring three scenarios concerning the future of this chapter--namely, the lack of an intellectual property …