Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Clarity In Remedies For Patent Cases, Ryan T. Holte

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the state of patent remedies following the Supreme Court's decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. (2006), which altered the standard for granting injunctions in patent infringement cases. The author argues that over a decade of inconsistent application and discussion regarding the eBay precedent has led to confusion in patent remedies. The article provides:A historical overview of the eBay case and the procedural factors contributing to the current state of uncertainty. An empirical analysis highlighting differences in injunction decisions between district courts and the Federal Circuit, noting the latter's continued inclination toward granting injunctions.A discussion on the …

Patent Aversion: An Empirical Study Of Patents Collateral In Bank Lending, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Erik Hille

Articles

The most valuable assets of many companies today are patents. If patents are valuable, why do banks operating across the United States refuse to lend against patents in commercial lending to reduce their risks? Lending is the primary function of banks. Yet banks have a strong aversion to accept patents as collateral, rendering the vast number of patents as idle assets. This empirical study is the first to identify the patent aversion problem as contrary to the frequent headlines of how valuable patents are to the economy. By carefully extracting relevant patent and security interest filings data and examining the …

Nuisance Law And The Doctrine Of Equivalents In Patent Law, Min-Chiuan Wang

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Nuisance Law and the Doctrine of Equivalents in Patent Law

Socially Responsible Corporate Ip, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

Faculty Publications

Many companies practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) as part of their branding and public relations efforts. For example, as part of their CSR strategies, some companies adopt voluntary codes of conduct in an effort to respect human rights. This Article contemplates the application of CSR principles to trade-related intellectual property (IP). In theory, patent and copyright laws promote progress and innovation, which is why IP rights are beneficial for both IP owners and for the public. Trademark rights encourage businesses to maintain certain standards and allow consumers to make more efficient choices. Though IP rights are often discussed in relation …

Squeeze Blood From Turnip: Abusing Trademark Law's Morality Provision In The Ttab, Cathay Y. N. Smith

Faculty Law Review Articles

Trademark law prohibits the registration of trademarks that are immoral or scandalous. This "Morality Provision"in trademark law has been criticized as being an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech and resulting in inconsistency and other problems at the USPTO examination stage. This essay exposes another problem with the Morality Provision, which is its abuse by third parties in the TTAB. This essay explores why the Morality Provision-and not any other provisions in trademark law-is susceptible to this type of abuse and outlines examples of these abusive cases in the TTAB. These cases show that, in inter partes proceedings in the TTAB, …

Recognizing The Relevance Of Human Rights: The Application Of The Presumption Of Conformity In The Context Of Copyright, Graham Reynolds

All Faculty Publications

This article discusses the application of the presumption of conformity with international law in the context of copyright. Although Canadian courts have applied the presumption of conformity in a number of copyright cases, no Canadian court has explicitly considered, under the presumption of conformity, whether interpretations of provisions of the Copyright Act are consistent with, or reflect the values and principles of, international human rights treaties that Canada has signed and ratified. In this article, I will argue that Canadian courts applying the presumption of conformity in the context of copyright should do so with reference to Canada’s obligations under …

Not De Minimis: (Improper) Appropriation In Copyright, Oren Bracha

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Makeup Dupes And Fair Use, Samantha Primeaux

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Half-Century Of Scholarship On The Chinese Intellectual Property System, Peter K. Yu

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Media Threats: Examining The Canadian Criminal Law Response, Benjamin Perrin

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article begins by discussing the legislative history, essential elements, and purpose of the threats offence in s. 264.1(1) of the Criminal Code. It then analyzes major reported Canadian judicial decisions dealing with social media threats, based on the five themes identified above. Finally, this article concludes by highlighting the implications and limitations of this study, as well as areas for future research.

The Missing Hyperlink — An Empirical Study: Can Canadian Laws Effectively Protect Consumers Purchasing Online?, Mariella Montplaisir

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Canadian consumer protection legislation applicable to online transactions generally works by a two-pronged method: first, private international law rules ensure that in most cases, consumers can sue in their home province under that province’s law; and, second, a wide range of substantive obligations are imposed on merchants, and failure to comply with these obligations provides consumers with a right of cancellation. This study considers the private international law rules applicable to online consumer contracts, and discusses the unique jurisdictional challenges presented by online transactions. This study also provides an overview of Canadian legislation applicable to online consumer transactions, and examines …

Government Surveillance Accountability: The Failures Of Contemporary Canadian Interception Reports, Christopher Parsons, Adam Molnar

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Real time electronic government surveillance is recognized as amongst the most intrusive types of government activity upon private citizens’ lives. There are usually stringent warranting practices that must be met prior to law enforcement or security agencies engaging in such domestic surveillance. In Canada, federal and provincial governments must report annually on these practices when they are conducted by law enforcement or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, disclosing how often such warrants are sought and granted, the types of crimes such surveillance is directed towards, and the efficacy of such surveillance in being used as evidence and securing convictions.

This …

Intellectual Property Law, David L. Mccombs, Phillip B. Philbin, Jamie Raju, Catherine Reynolds

SMU Annual Texas Survey

No abstract provided.

Reaching For Mediocrity: Competition And Stagnation In Pharmaceutical Innovation, Son Le, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Patents might incentivize invention but they do not guarantee firms will invest in projects that maximize social utility. We model how risk-neutral firms’ ability to obtain substantial private returns on marginal new technologies causes them to “reach for mediocrity” by investing in socially-suboptimal projects, even in the presence of competition and new entrants. Focusing primarily on pharmaceutical innovation, we analyze various policy interventions to solve this underinvestment problem. In particular, we describe a new approach to patents – a value based patent system, which ties patent protection to the underlying invention’s social value – and show how it incentivizes socially-optimal …

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …

Public Authority Liability And The Regulation Of Nanotechnology: A European Perspective, Nina Natalia Baranowska

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper argues that in certain circumstances public authorities should be liable for regulating nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is an emerging field of technology that enables to control shape and size of various structures, devices and systems at nanometer scale on which one nanometer is equal to one-billionth of a meter. In spite of being a nascent field of science and technology, its scope of application – in the food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, construction, textile, electronics, and agricultural industries – is expanding rapidly. The risks associated to nanotechnology, however, and its long-term consequences are still largely unknown, particularly in regards to its health …

The Aleph Bet: Debating Metaphors For Information, Data Handling And The Right To Be Forgotten, Chris Prince, Micheal Vonn, Lex Gill

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Court rulings in the European Union (EU) have now established that individuals may seek erasure of personal information posted online. Typically, this involves de-indexing a website from search results, and in some instances the removal of content from primary sources sites. This has, in turn, led to debate around both the logistics and the unintended consequences of removing information online, and subsequent discussions have grappled with a range of images and metaphors to map that new legal reality. This essay surveys that debate, the imagery it employs, and the various logics associated with these metaphors.

Platform Law And The Brand Enterprise, Sonia K. Katyal, Leah Chan Grinvald

Scholarly Works

The emergence of platforms has transformed the digital economy, reshaping and recasting online transactions within the service industry. This transformation, as many have argued, has created new and unimagined challenges for policymakers and regulators, as well as for traditional, offline companies. Most scholarship examining platforms discuss their impact on employment law or consumer protection. Yet trademark law, which is central to the success of the platform enterprise, has been mostly overlooked within these discussions. To address this gap, this article discusses the emergence of two central forms of platform entrepreneurship-the platform, or "macrobrand" and the platform service provider, or the …

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …

Justifying India's Patent Position To The United States International Trade Commission And Office Of The United States Trade Representative, Sean Flynn, Srividhya Ragavan, Brook Baker

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Law Gets Experienced, Victoria Phillips

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Introduction: A decade ago, in Clinical Legal Education and the Public Interest in Intellectual Property Law, I described with my faculty colleagues our motivations for launching a public interest intellectual property law clinic at the American University Washington College of Law. That article introduced our goals and framework for a pioneering clinic framed around a variety of live-client student representations performed under close faculty supervision, weekly case rounds focusing on issues experienced directly by the students in their representations, and a seminar built around a year-long lawyering simulation addressing the public interest dimensions of intellectual property. In that article, we …

Cancer's Ip, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The state of publicly funded science is in peril. Instead, new biomedical research efforts — in particular, the recent funding of a “Cancer Moonshot” — have focused on employing public-private partnerships, joint ventures between private industry and public agencies, as being more politically palatable. Yet, public-private partnerships like the Cancer Moonshot center on the production of public goods: scientific information. Using private incentives in this context presents numerous puzzles for both intellectual property law and information policy. This Article examines whether—and to what extent — intellectual property and information policy can be appropriately tailored to the goals of public-private partnerships. …

Janeway: A Scholarly Communications Platform [Start-Up Story], Martin Paul Eve, Andy Byers

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Describes how developers at the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London embarked upon building a journal submission and hosting platform, Janeway, learning from their experiences of running the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).

How Should Damages Be Calculated For Design Patent Infringement?, Mark D. Janis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Patent Pool Outsiders, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Individuals who decline to join cooperative groups — outsiders — raise concerns in many areas of law and policy. From trade policy to climate agreements to class action procedures, the fundamental concern is the same: a single member of the group who drops out could weaken the remaining union. This Article analyzes the outsider problem as it affects patents.

The outsider question has important bearing on patent and antitrust policy. By centralizing and simplifying complex patent licensing deals, patent pools conserve tremendous transaction costs. This allows for the widespread production and competitive sale of many useful technologies, particularly in the …

Digital Infrastructures That Embody Library Principles: The Imls National Digital Platform As A Framework For Digital Library Tools And Services, Trevor Owens, Ashley E. Sands, Emily Reynolds, James Neal, Stephen Mayeaux, Maura Marx

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Digital library infrastructures must not simply work. They must also manifest the core principles of libraries and archives. Since 2014, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has engaged with stakeholders from diverse library communities to consider collaborative approaches to building digital library tools and services. The “national digital platform” for libraries, archives, and museums is the framework that resulted from these dialogs.1 One key feature of the national digital platform (NDP) is the anchoring of core library principles within the development of digital tools and services. This essay explores how NDP-funded projects enact library principles as part of …

The New Separability, Lili Levi

Articles

In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the Supreme Court recently unveiled a new approach to separability. Because copyright law protects expression, not function, aesthetic features of useful articles are eligible for copyright protection only if they are separable from the functional work in which they are incorporated. But the Copyright Actdoes not define separability, and Star Athletica is the latest judicial effort to try to fill that void. Unfortunately, the new separability is open to a wide range of critiques. Relatively low-hanging fruit are the vagueness and indeterminacy of the new test, the Court's unsatisfactory attempts to avoid defining "function," …

The Central Claiming Renaissance, Andres Sawicki

Articles

The Supreme Court has recently reinvigorated the law of patentable subject matter. But beneath the headlines proclaiming the return of limits to patent eligibility, a more profound shift has taken place: central claiming is reborn.

The Court's eligibility cases are significant outliers compared to today's run-of-the-mill patent law because claim language plays little role in their analyses. In our modern peripheral claiming system, the claim language is the near exclusive guide to the patent's boundaries. But in its earliest days, our patent system pursued a central claiming approach, in which the inventor's actual work determined the patent's scope. The Court's …

Chocolate, Fashion, Toys And Cabs: The Misunderstood Distinctiveness Of Non-Traditional Trademarks, Irene Calboli

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

What do Cadbury, Toblerone and Kit-Kat chocolates, the Rubik’s Cube and Lego mini-figurine toys, Louboutin shoes, Bottega Veneta bags and London Taxi Company cabs all have in common? These products have been, along with several others, protagonists of the rising trend of registering shapes and other non-traditional trademarks in a variety of countries, and then, in several cases, protagonist of ensuing litigation addressing the validity of these marks. To a large extent, the review panels and the courts involved in these cases have declared several of these marks invalid or have reduced their scope considerably. Hence, these cases have often …

The De Minimis Defense In Sound Recordings: How A Trivial Claim Leads To A Big Question, Elvin Canario

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.