Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

This Is No Laughing Matter: How Should Comedians Be Able To Protect Their Jokes?, Sarah Gamblin

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This note will discuss the current state of protection for jokes and comedy. As it is now, the only protection comics have is self-help, meaning comedians take punishing thefts into their own hands. This note will dive into the reasons why the current legislature and courts refuse to recognize jokes as copyrightable. Specifically, why many believe that jokes to not meet the qualifications of being an expression, as well as the fear that protecting jokes will lead to chilled speech.

Additionally, this note shall discuss the ways jokes could be protected under the current legal scheme, including trademark and state …

Masthead

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

Gene Patents, Drug Prices, And Scientific Research: Unexpected Effects Of Recently Proposed Patent Eligibility Legislation, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Recently, Congress has considered legislation to amend§ 101, a section of the Patent Act that the Supreme Court has held to prohibit patenting of laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. This draft legislation would expand the realm of patent-eligible subject matter, overturning the Court's precedents along the way. The draft legislation, and movement to change this doctrine of patent law, made substantial headway with a subcommittee of the Senate holding numerous roundtables and hearings on the subject.

This article considers some less-discussed consequences of that draft legislative proposal. The legislation likely opens the door to patenting of subject …

Sea Change: The Rising Tide Of Pro Bono Legal Services For The Creative Community, Victoria Phillips

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Measuring Trademark Dilution By Tarnishment, Suneal Bedi, David Reibstein

Indiana Law Journal

The law of trademark tarnishment—a type of trademark dilution—is in disarray. The

basic definition is deceptively simple. Trademark tarnishment occurs when a junior

mark harms the reputation of a substantially similar existing senior trademark by

associating itself with something perverse or deviant. However, it turns out that

Congress and the courts disagree over the prima facie evidence necessary to prove

its existence. The problem is that federal law and related legal principles are simply

ill-equipped to adequately analyze this unique market-driven doctrine. To make

matters worse, legal scholars cannot even agree on whether trademark tarnishment

can empirically exist in the …

Cultural Ip Vs. Commercial Ip [Notes], J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

Articles

No abstract provided.

When Standards Collide With Intellectual Property: Teaching About Standard Setting Organizations, Technology, And Microsoft V. Motorola, Cynthia L. Dahl

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Automated Copyright Enforcement Online: From Blocking To Monetization Of User-Generated Content, Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Global platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok live on users ‘freely’ sharing content, in exchange for the data generated in the process. Many of these digital market actors nowadays employ automated copyright enforcement tools, allowing those who claim ownership to identify matching content uploaded by users. While most debates on state-sanctioned platform liability and automated private ordering by platforms has focused on the implications of user generated content being blocked, this paper places a spotlight on monetization. Using YouTube’s Content ID as principal example, I show how monetizing user content is by far the norm, and blocking the …

Innovative Approaches To Diversion Data, Sean Flynn, Robin Olsen, Maggie Wolk

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Prosecutors across the country are collecting and using data to make decisions in their offices. At the same time, prosecutors are interested in developing and sustaining prosecutorial diversion approaches. Prosecutors can use data to assist in decision-making regarding diversion case processing choices as well as to make office policy and resource allocation decisions that, in turn, support expanded diversion programs. Data collection can help prosecutors decide if a prosecutorial diversion program will work for them, and if so, what characteristics it should have. Finally, data can help prosecutors see whether they are obtaining their intended outcomes. Prosecutors possess varying levels …

Trade Mark Licensing And Covid-19: Why Fashion Companies Have A Duty To Comply With Their Legal Obligations, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

For the past several months, Covid-19 has dominated the intellectual property (IP) debate. Most discussions have focused on the implications of patent protection on access to treatments against the virus and a hopefully soon to be found vaccine. In these remarks, I would like to focus on another Covid-19 crisis making headlines across the world and partially related to IP: millions of workers in the garment industry in developing countries have been fired or furloughed as fashion companies have cancelled orders due to plunging sales since the pandemic’s beginning. Famous Western groups such as Inditex (Zara), C&A, Target, and Marks …

A Unified Theory Of Convoy Goods, Michael Risch

Faculty Publications

Patent damages jurisprudence continues to struggle with how to treat the sales of noninfringing goods. When such goods have nothing to do with the patent, the answer is easy -- no damages. But when the goods are sold along with patented goods (so-called convoy goods), then courts and commentators are all over the place. The confusion is even worse because most discussion fails to consider whether and how convoy goods should affect lost profits versus reasonable royalty analysis. This commentary provides a general definition of convoy goods and provides a unified theory about how to treat them in both lost …

The Machine As Author, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Machines are increasingly good at emulating humans and laying siege to what has been a strictly human outpost: intellectual creativity.

At this juncture, we cannot know with certainty how high machines will reach on the creativity ladder when compared to, or measured against, their human counterparts, but we do know this. They are far enough already to force us to ask a genuinely hard and complex question, one that intellectual property (“IP”) scholars and courts will need to answer soon; namely, whether copyrights should be granted to productions made not by humans but by machines.

This Article’s specific objective is …

Trips And Its Contents, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, I published TRIPS and Its Discontents in a symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of the WTO TRIPS Agreement. At that time, developing countries were deeply discontent with the Agreement and the new and higher intellectual property standards that the WTO had imposed upon them. By contrast, when the TRIPS Agreement was about to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in April 2019, the developing countries' trenchant critiques of the Agreement were mostly gone. Also disappearing were their usual accusations of neoimperialism.

What has happened? Have developing countries successfully adjusted, or become sensitized, to the high intellectual property standards in the …

Against Progress: Interventions About Equality In Supreme Court Cases About Copyright Law, Jessica Silbey

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Despite expanding scope and the rise of “more” intellectual property, Against Progress demonstrates that turn-of-the century intellectual property practice challenges the “progress as more” paradigm. Through various methodological interventions – close reading of cases, doctrinal analysis, and various qualitative empirical methods – Against Progress demonstrates how contemporary accounts of intellectual property are not primarily anchored by claims of “more” or in economic growth terms. Instead, creative and innovative practices (and disputes concerning them) revolve around adjacent values and principles central to our constitutional system such as equality, privacy, and community or general welfare.

Two Centuries Of Trademark And Copyright Law: A Citation-Network-Analysis Approach, Joseph Scott Miller

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

The Supreme Court has decided many more patent cases than trademark or copyright cases. This is so not just in the past decade—the focus of the tenth annual Supreme Court IP Review at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, in September 2019—but in the past 20 decades. In gathering the entire body of the Court’s IP caselaw for study with cita-tion-network-analysis tools, I found that patent cases greatly outnum-ber trademark and copyright cases. Moreover, patent cases, especially patent and antitrust cases, dominate the metrics for the most central cases in the citation network.

Aesthetic Functionality At A Crossroads: What A Troublesome Doctrine Can Learn From Its Past, Xiaoren Wang

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

With the rise of branding and marketing, firms started using trade dress such as product features or packages to identify themselves. Some firms claim an exclusive trademark right on their trade dress. However, granting a trademark right to some trade dresses might hinder competition. For example, if one firm claims trademark on the heart-shaped candy box, it will prevent others from using the same package to compete in the Valentine’s Day sweets market. So U.S. courts developed a doctrine called aesthetic functionality to avoid the competition hindrance consequence. Aesthetic functionality refers to the situation where a trade dress has the …

Ai Patents: A Data Driven Approach, Brian S. Haney

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

While artificial intelligence (AI) research brings challenges, the resulting systems are no accident. In fact, academics, researchers, and industry professionals have been developing AI systems since the early 1900s. AI is a field uniquely positioned at the intersection of several scientific disciplines including computer science, applied mathematics, and neuroscience. The AI design process is meticulous, deliberate, and time-consuming – involving intensive mathematical theory, data processing, and computer programming. All the while, AI’s economic value is accelerating. As such, protecting the intellectual property (IP) springing from this work is a keystone for technology firms acting in competitive markets.

Choosing The Consequences Of Tam And Brunetti, Alfred C. Yen

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

In Matal v. Tam and Iancu v. Brunetti, the Supreme Court did something it has never done before – namely apply strict First Amendment scrutiny to trademark law. This is a big deal. Many have argued, to relatively little effect, that intellectual property laws, like trademarks, raise serious free speech problems. It is therefore significant news for the Court to declare portions of the Lanham Act unconstitutional not once, but twice.

Ranking Parallel Petitions Before The Ptab: A Survey, Monica Grewal, Heather Petruzzi, Wenli Gu Phd

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

To understand the trends in recent ranking practice, this article an-alyzes a subset of ranked parallel petitions that received an institution decision before or on February 20, 2020. Using a search filter in Docket Navigator to locate multiple petitions challenging the same pa-tent, the authors identified 39 occurrences of ranked parallel petitions that challenge the same claims of the same patents, as well as 2 occur-rences of ranked parallel petitions that challenge different claims of the same patent.

Unfettered Discretion: A Closer Look At The Board's Discretion To Deny Institution, Joel D. Sayres, Reid E. Dodge

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

To ensure that the doorway to IPRs was not limitless, Congress de-lineated a specific threshold before a trial could be instituted. That threshold is set forth in 35 U.S.C. § 314(a), which provides that IPR may not be instituted unless the petition “shows that there is a reasonable likelihood that the petitioner would prevail with respect to at least 1 of the claims challenged in the petition.” However, the Board has increas-ingly identified circumstances in which it will not institute IPR, even where a petitioner satisfies this statutory threshold. Indeed, the Board has seemingly adopted the view that it has …

Expert Discovery Protections: Comparing District Courts With The Ptab, Blaine M. Hackman, Vi T. Tran, Katherine A. Helm

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Expert witness testimony can be critical in patent litigation in all forums. In Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) proceedings, particularly inter partes review (“IPR”) and post-grant review (“PGR”), expert testimony through declarations and depositions plays a central role in both challenging and defending patents. In district courts, live expert testimony is key to proving infringement and invalidity. Accordingly, the legal protections governing the disclosure of expert testimony in discovery in both forums are carefully proscribed, but with notable distinctions.

Post-Ait Review Of Real Party In Interest Decisions, Stephanie M. Brooker, Robert Breetz, Matthew Johnson, Thomas Ritchie

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Throughout the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (“PTAB”) history, patent owners have tried to leverage a petitioner’s alleged failure to name all real parties-in-interest (“RPIs”) as a way to achieve denial of an inter partes review (“IPR”) petition or trial termination. The effectiveness of those efforts has ebbed and flowed. Initially, some PTAB panels viewed naming of RPIs as a jurisdictional requirement, concluding that RPI-naming errors were not fixable after the 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) one-year bar. Petitioners could lose their petition filing date based on RPI missteps, resulting in then untimely petitions. Later decisions backed away from that hardline …

Renegade Riders And The Marks They Love: Can The Government Tear That Patch Right Off Your Leather Jacket?, Angela M. Nieves

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

A collective membership mark is a type of non-commercial trademark used to identify and associate with something or someone. In February 2019, a California district court ruled that the government could not forcibly seize from the Mongols Motorcycle Club their prized collective membership marks, seemingly halting a ten-year legal tug of war. The court held that forfeiture of these marks was not only unconstitutional, it was illogical.

This Comment explains how and why expressive marks like the Mongols’ should not be automatically deemed off limits to the government. It proposes a trademark-specific doctrine to help courts draw a constitutional line …

The Eleventh Auer: The Effect Of Kisor V. Wilkie On Rulemaking And Adjudication At The United States Patent And Trademark Office, Andrew Schneider, Jonathan Stroud

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Courts have long deferred to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous rule or statute, in light of the agency’s relevant technical expertise. But some judges prefer that Article III courts review everything; and deferring often involves relying on an agency’s interpretation of a genuinely ambiguous statute—the oft-discussed Chevron deference doctrine. This Article analyzes the more nuanced Auer deference, where a court defers to an agency’s later interpretation of its own ambiguous rule or regulation. Recently, the Supreme Court took and decided Kisor v. Wilkie, which dramatically modified the Auer doctrine. While Kisor appealed a claim for veteran’s benefits that implicated …

Patents, Information, And Innovation, Brenda M. Simon

Brooklyn Law Review

Inventors and commercialization partners often rely on patents to facilitate the exchange of sensitive information. Most scholarship in this area has focused on the areas of software and biotechnology. To provide a richer description of the role of patents in the innovative process, this project evaluates the existing literature and sets forth examples drawn from a series of interviews with professionals from the largely-overlooked medical device industry. The limited analysis of the medical device industry has focused on the largest few dozen firms—as publicly-traded entities, a great deal of data about them is readily available. Small medical device companies are …

Predicting Administrative Patent Challenges, Talia Bar, Brendan Costello

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

The Problem Of Modern Monetization Of Memes: How Copyright Law Can Give Protection To Meme Creators, Mark Marciszewski

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Some legal questions answered in this article on the horizon for the courts and lawyers is how should courts apply copyright law to popular media made by small scale creators and shared on the internet, otherwise known as "memes."

Part II of this article will focus on validity of potential copyright protection in internet memes. It will start by describing the increased monetization surrounding memes and how this monetization calls for greater interest for meme creators to protect their work. It will then describe the merits of individual copyright interests in internet memes.

Part III of this article will focus …

Good Initiative, Bad Judgement: The Unintended Consequences Of Title Ix's Proportionality Standard On Ncaa Men's Gymnastics And The Transgender Athlete, Jeffrey Shearer

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Title IX fails to provide the tools or guidelines necessary to equalize opportunities for all student athletes in the collegiate setting despite the government’s continuous effort to explain the law. This failure is because judicial precedent has largely developed around the binary proportionality test of compliance. Title IX was originally intended to equalize educational opportunities for male and female students in order to remedy past discrimination in our society. However, the application of Title IX has frequently created fewer opportunities in athletics due to the unintended relationship between the proportionality standard and the social phenomenon that is the commercialization of …

America's Newest Boogeyman For Deviant Teen Behavior: Violent Video Games And The First Amendment, Joseph C. Alfe, Grant D. Talabay

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

Are violent video games harming America’s youth? Is it possible a series of interconnected circuit boards can influence children (or even adults) to become, themselves, violent? If so, how should our society-- and government-- respond?

To properly answer this last query, violent video games must be viewed through the lens of the First Amendment. Simply put: do games depicting grotesque acts of depravity so profound as to negatively influence the psyche warrant the full constitutional protections ordinarily guaranteed under the mantle of free speech and expression? Are these guarantees without limit? If not, how far may the government go in …

Copyright Reform: Imagining More Balanced Copyright Laws, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Earlier chapters of this book provide a history of copyright and libraries in the United States, a review of outdated language in the existing copyright code, and a discussion of actions by both copyright owners and the public to rebalance copyright outside of legislation. This chapter simply imagines what copyright could be if we disregard the known political and legal obstacles. It starts with no constraints, which one might argue is both impractical and foolish. Why spend time discussing what could be when treaties, self-interest, and powerful industry lobbies stand in the way?

The answer is simply that environments can …