Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Table Of Contents & Introductory Material

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

The Great War (Taylor's Version): Examining The New Era Of Recording Artists & Master Recording Ownership, Victoria B. Villanueva

Journal of Legislation

In 2019, Taylor Swift took to social media to voice her unease with the recent sale of her entire master recording catalogue to Ithaca Holdings, a sale that allegedly occurred without her explicit permission. Following a series of negotiations, holdouts, and ultimate deadlock, Swift made the critical and costly decision to re-record and re-release each of those six albums under her sole ownership in an effort to reclaim them as her own work—re-recordings publicly denoted by “Taylor’s Version”. This highly-publicized feud brought to the public’s attention a decades-long conflict between the recording artist and the recording company, one that has …

"Reasonable [Cybersecurity] Measures" For Digital Trade Secrets: Lessons From Marketing, Raj Sachdev

Law Faculty Scholarship

The loss of digital trade secrets in marketing and beyond, often the source of competitive advantage, can have disastrous impacts on brands and companies. Bad actors want to get their digital hands on digital trade secrets, and other actors and factors may also cause a risk to their secrecy. The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) makes clear that “reasonable measures” must be taken to maintain the secrecy of a trade secret. Likewise, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) requires “reasonable steps.” However, in a digital age, the definition of what is “reasonable” is even more unclear than in offline settings. …

Stopping The Spread Of The World's Oldest Hatred - What U.S. Sports Stakeholders Can Do To Combat Antisemitism, Mark Conrad

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The consistent rise in reported acts of antisemitism in the United States over the last decade has prompted debate about strategies to combat this age-old menace. The Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military response in Gaza has exacerbated this trend. Many have debated ways to confront the issue, including informing the public about the magnitude of the problem and finding policies to reduce incidents of antisemitism. The sports industry could help in this quest. Because millions of people follow professional, college, high school, and Olympic sports, organizations and individual athletes could participate in activities designed …

Ai In The Courtroom: The Boundaries Of Robolawyers And Robojudges, Hadar Y. Jabotinsky, Michal Lavi

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing and undoubtedly impacting every aspect of our lives. From lethal drones, to Apple’s Siri, and improved cancer diagnostics, AI algorithms are also increasingly integrated into decision-making. This article illuminates the impact of AI on the legal system and profession.

Currently, AI legal tools support lawyers’ and judges’ work and can assist in tasks such as due diligence, legal analysis, classification of documents by Technology-Assisted Review (TAR), providing legal advice, and engaging in predicting legal judgments. AI can even assist judges in decision making for risk assessments during sentencing. The …

Decency And Responsibility: Preserving Egyptian Tally Cloth Cultural Heritage And Protecting The Intellectual Property Of Egyptian Artisans., Noha Fawzy Ph.D, Marwa Zein Ph.D, Ahmed Elseragy Ph.D, Catherine Harper Ph.D

Arts and Design

Tally is an exquisite Egyptian netting fabric, cotton or linen with nickel silver, copper or brass strip embroidery, a powerful symbol of Egypt's opulent textile and artisanal culture. Traditionally handmade, it originated in Upper Egypt’s Asyut region where ancient Egyptian makers pioneered embellishment of translucent cloth with metallic threads. Its iconography - geometric flora, fauna, humans and camels – in black, white or ecru. With beautiful drape and fluidity, it is a highly valued part of Egypt’s rich cultural heritage.

Preserving Tally and protecting the intellectual property rights of its artisans is urgent to ensure sustainable livelihoods, safeguard this unique …

Time Is Money And Anticompetitive: The Luxury Watch Industry's Weaponization Of Intellectual Property Against The Right To Repair, Isha Jadhav

American University Business Law Review

Since 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), legislators, and activists have jointly worked together to implement consumer rights in repairing personal property on both a state and federal level in the United States. These efforts have largely targeted the automobile and technology industries; these sectors have been known to “tie” their goods to authorized repair services, limiting consumer choice on where, how, and when to repair their goods. However, this issue is not limited to the automobile and technology industries, as luxury watches have gained newfound popularity, creating right to repair issues within the industry.

Despite …

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

Molecular Diagnostic Patenting After Mayo V. Prometheus: An Empirical Analysis, Colleen V. Chien, Jenna Clark, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

Since the United States Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Mayo v. Prometheus announced a new legal test for patent-eligible subject matter, policymakers, and scholars have vigorously debated the decision's impact on molecular diagnostics innovation. Molecular diagnostics serve as the cornerstone of personalized medicine and its promise of treatments with fewer side effects and better outcomes for patients. This article contributes to the presently thin evidence base on the impact of Mayo by using data on patent applications, examinations, and grants from 2010 to 2019 to comprehensively trace the effects of the test and subsequent related developments. Using descriptive data as …

What Is Copywritable In Software?, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Scènes À Faire: Cliché As Legislative Fact, Sarah Louise Bishop

Connecticut Law Review

In the last ten years, federal courts have quietly begun to apply copyright’s scènes à faire doctrine to dismiss infringement claims before party discovery has occurred. This move theoretically should not be possible, because applying the doctrine requires evidence of the conventions and tropes of the artistic genres at issue—something unlikely to be reflected in the parties’ pleadings.

This Article identifies this trend and explores the workarounds district courts use to achieve these dismissals without a factual record before them. The most common methods courts use are inconsistent with both the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence and risk …

Design Problems, Mark P. Mckenna, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay draws on our empirical research into designers and their work to investigate the limits of intellectual property law for achieving its goal of progress in the design context. We focus on two related aspects of our research and also address a pressing doctrinal question in design patent law. The two research questions we discuss are: (1) How do designers conceive of and solve design problems through innovative design practice?; and (2) How do designers incorporate human values of coherence, inclusivity, and sustainability in their process, imbuing their practice with a kind of politics? The related doctrinal question concerns …

Locked Out: An Empirical Study Of The Impacts Of Technological Protection Measures On Digital Content Access In Canadian Academic Libraries, Anthony D. Rosborough, Katherine Silins

Reports & Public Policy Documents

This report presents findings from a comprehensive empirical qualitative study involving interviews with Canadian academic librarians, copyright officers, and information professionals to examine how TPMs affect digital content access. The research reveals that TPMs are deeply embedded within the technology and licensing frameworks used by libraries, creating opaque barriers to lawful access. Practitioners often lack clarity on whether restrictions stem from TPMs or from contractual or platform design, complicating their ability to support fair dealing uses of works, preservation, and teaching. This ambiguity has increased substantially with the rise of controlled digital lending (CDL) and other access models that have …

Navigating The Legal Risk Universities’ Healthcare Providers Potentially Face From Medical Decisions Impacting Collegiate Athletes’ Future Nil Income While Following The Ncaa’S Mental Health Best Practices, Kenneth D. Ferguson

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Decentral Intelligence Agency: The Law And Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Andrew W. Torrance , Ph. D., Dr. Bill Tomlinson , Ph.D.

Touro Law Review

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is rapidly gaining autonomy across a range of domains, such as business, education, social relationships, and warfare. This article examines the legal and policy implications of autonomous AI agents, a rapidly evolving technology that challenges existing regulatory frameworks. Drawing from tort, agency, property, contract, privacy, human rights, and constitutional law, we propose a comprehensive approach to govern these increasingly independent entities. Our analysis begins with a historical perspective, tracing both the evolution of autonomous computational systems and of legal responses to such technologies. We then conduct a comparative study of AI governance across jurisdictions, highlighting regulatory gaps …

Genetic Property Rhetoric And The Public Domain, Dave Fagundes

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

Among the many themes that illuminate Jorge Contreras’s The Genome Defense, this Essay focuses on property. It considers the rhetorical role played by property in convincing both courts and the public that patenting genetic data was legally and ethically objectionable. This Essay begins by locating property—and public property—as a major theme in the dialogue surrounding the Myriad litigation. It then situates this rhetorical move in the context of property-talk generally, highlighting the distinctiveness of leveraging public rather than private ownership as a means of accessing moral intuitions. Finally, this Essay reflects on what the use of public property rhetoric …

The Implementation And Use Of Intimacy Coordinators In Motion Picture Productions, John J. Chung, Pia Piscitelli

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Boden Lecture: Taxation Of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, W. Robert Thomas

Marquette Law Review

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI. The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Seattle University Law Review

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

The State has always regulated the intra-firm communications that make corporate governance possible, most commonly by mandating disclosures of information by a corporation to its shareholders. Some such laws are labeled “securities regulation,” but securities regulation is a broad category that extends to speech by actors who are outside the corporate enterprise as well. Also, the conventional securities regulation category does not capture all such laws; other examples, including informationforcing mandates, can be found in state corporate law. This Article uses the term “corporate governance speech” to describe the communications among shareholders, directors, and officers through which corporate governance is …

Dark Accounting Matter, Colleen Honigsberg

Seattle University Law Review

Physicists calculate that approximately 85% of the matter in the universe is composed of “dark matter” that “does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is therefore difficult to detect.” The S&P 500 currently trades at a price-to-book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80% appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

Some “dark accounting matter” is composed of factors commonly described as components of “ESG.” Human capital, for example, is an intangible asset …

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …

True Law As Genre: Narrative Nonfiction And The Law, Jorge L. Contreras

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

The Genome Defense, which offers a book-length narrative nonfiction account of the civil litigation that led to the elimination of patents on human genes in the United States, is a member of a distinct literary subgenre that I term True Law. Like the older and better-known True Crime genre, True Law narratives blend the conventions of journalism and novelistic writing to describe complex legal disputes in a manner that is engaging and accessible to the general public. True Law accounts, which have increased in number and popularity since the publication of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action in 1995, serve …

On Snow’S Intellectual Property And Immorality, David O. Taylor

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

In this Essay, I consider the “why” and “how” of Professor Snow’s controversial, countercultural, important, and relevant position that immorality may result in the denial of intellectual property protection. First, I highlight how surprising it is that Professor Snow’s argument springs from the theories underlying intellectual property protection, rather than the theories underlying the morality and ethics he believes ought to be considered in determining intellectual property protection. No one (that I know, at least) goes to the Environmental Protection Agency seeking better regulations to protect the environment and uses the labor desert theory of property rights as an argument. …

Copyright, Ebooks, And The Future Of Digital Lending, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Public libraries face a digital lending crisis. Even as library patrons demand greater access to digital materials, eBook publishers have subjected libraries to onerous licensing terms. These include prices substantially higher than those charged to the general public, as well as stringent constraints on license duration and/or loan volume, forcing many libraries to repurchase their eBooks every one or two years. Some publishers are releasing new books only in digital formats, making it even more costly for libraries to maintain robust collections. eBook publishers also compel libraries to use specific digital lending platforms which pose risks to patron privacy. At …

Cross-Border Limitations And Exceptions To Copyright: “Powered By Ai”, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Businesses and institutions that wish to utilize copyright protected works in multiple countries face a multiplicity of national copyright laws; although national copyright laws have been harmonized in accordance with several international treaties and harmonized even more in the European Union member states by European Union legislation, countries’ copyright laws continue to vary. The multiplicity of national copyright laws raises costs of transnational operations, including for businesses and institutions that rely on limitations and exceptions to copyright (“L&Es”) in multiple countries. For example, AI companies might want to rely on L&Es to train and deploy their AI in multiple countries, …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead