Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Comparative Intellectual Property Protection For Marijuana: United States Vs. The European Union, Jillian Gosser

Global Business Law Review

Protecting intellectual property relating to marijuana is a complicated endeavor. The federal ban on marijuana renders trademark protection difficult at best, and patent protection, while available, still rife with complications. In Europe, the laws pose similar challenges in the protection and enforcement of marijuana related intellectual property. This Note presents a comparative law analysis of the various ways marijuana related intellectual property may be protected in the United States and Europe. Different types of intellectual property protection explored include utility patents, design patents, trademarks, plant patents, Plant Variety Protection Act coverage, and Community Plant Variety Act coverage. This Note explores …

Wrongful Improvers As A Guiding Principle For Application Of The Ftc’S Ip Deletion Requirement, Emma Elder

Washington Law Review

The 2021 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into cloud storage app developer Everalbum resulted in a consent decree that required Everalbum to delete not only unlawfully collected data, but also algorithms created using that data. The FTC had imposed this kind of penalty only once before. Questions remain about how the FTC will apply this so-called intellectual property (IP) deletion requirement in the future. This Comment argues that situations where companies develop intellectual property from misappropriated consumer data are analogous to cases where courts seek to apply the property law rule of the wrongful improver, i.e., where one party knowingly …

Centering Black Women In Patent History, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Kara Swanson’s latest article is a remarkable example of legal historical scholarship that excavates stories from the past to illuminate the present. It is chock full of archival evidence and historical analysis that explains gaps and silences in the United States patent registry as evidence of marginalized inventors–particularly Black women–who should be named inventors but are not.

The article is arresting reading for anyone interested in antebellum history, intellectual property, and the intersection of racism and sexism in law. Mostly, I am grateful to Professor Swanson for doing the obviously very hard work of digging through archives, reading microfiche, …

The 14th Annual Sir Hugh Laddie Lecture - Mr. Justice Laddie And His Intellectual Property Cases: Of Millefeuilles And A Fish Called Elvis, David Vaver

Articles & Book Chapters

For me, it was a trip through the judgments of a master craftsman who could succinctly summarize the dispute before him; weigh the conflicting evidence; say what rang true and what did not; state the applicable law, often from first principles set in their historical and policy context; and end by saying who won and lost and what to do. Copyright law might be "over-strong", as he suggested in a 1996 lecture;14 but when he had to decide whether a TV documentary critical of cheque-book journalism could freely use another channel's footage to make its point, Laddie J. said his …

Teaching Doctrine For Justice Readiness, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clinics strive to teach students lawyering skills. But clinics should also teach students how to use those skills to confront injustice and promote justice, an approach Jane Aiken refers to as “justice readiness.” Casework for clients presents many opportunities for students to become justice ready, but not all matters do so equally. Clinics come with built-in limitations. Some matters involve injustices in one area of law while leaving others untouched. And others don’t require creative advocacy for justice. Casework remains a powerful driver of justice readiness, but it cannot do the job alone.

Teaching students doctrine through a social justice …

The Social Value Of Intellectual Property, Alina Ng

Journal Articles

The focus of this paper is not on how intellectual property owners can misuse intellectual property rights in harmful ways in society. Much has already been written about that topic. Instead, this paper is about how to encourage intellectual property owners, especially corporate owners, to make decisions and implement strategies about their intellectual property rights that are socially valuable and positively impactful. This paper argues that if corporate and business owners of intellectual property understand the role that their intellectual property rights can have in creating a positive social impact, the influence that they can have in the market as …

Information Theory And Patent Documents, W. Michael Schuster

Akron Law Review

Recent scholarship has expanded the scope of analytical tools available to patent law researchers. The foundation of information theory published by Claude Shannon has been applied to textual analysis to determine the similarities of patents and to assess a patent’s value. This article presents a theoretical application of information theory to quantify lexical ambiguity and originality in innovation within patent law.

Revisiting The Justification Of Trademark Protection For Single Drug Compositions: A Critical Analysis From A Regulatory Perspective, Kuhu Tiwari, Dr. Niharika Sahoo Bhattacharya

Akron Law Review

Trademarks, which are premised on product differentiation, are alleged to play a divergent role when used on pharmaceutical products: they tend to create an artificial product differentiation for the bioequivalent pharmaceutical products that are marketed as branded, generics, and branded-generic products. It is implied that the companies incorporate trademarks to market their products to different consumers at different prices. However, concerns arise when a company uses multiple trademarks for a single active pharmaceutical ingredient (API); sometimes, the company labels each trademark as treating a different medical condition.

This practice of brand proliferation may pose risks to patient safety by confusing …

Fair Use As A Market Facilitator, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Dan Bombach

Akron Law Review

The Digital Age has enabled individuals worldwide to store, organize, and share everything from cherished memories embodied in photographs and videos to academic writing and correspondence. Yet, archived collections of academic, public, and private libraries are out of reach to many, and many books are now beyond reach because they are no longer in print. The high cost of digitization exacerbates these challenges.

In 2004, Google Inc. responded to these issues by announcing a project to scan and digitize the collections of several leading universities and public libraries (the “Google Books” project). The project offered users the opportunity to search …

Letting Anarchy Loose On The World: The Anarchist Cookbook And How Copyright Fails The Author, Debora Halbert

Akron Law Review

The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell remains one of the most controversial books in print, even 50 years after its first publication. The story to be told about its ongoing publication can teach us about the politics of authorship, ownership, publication, copyright assignments, the public domain, and the legacies our printed words leave behind. Later in life Powell regretted publishing the book and wished that it would be removed from publication and circulation but stated that he did not own the copyright and so could not control the book. However, even at his death the book remained in print and …

Are Cryptopunks Copyrightable?, Brian L. Frye

Pepperdine Law Review

Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks NFTs are iconic. Created in 2017, they were among the first NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Four years later, they are among the most valuable, selling for anywhere from $200,000 to millions of dollars. The CryptoPunks collection consists of 10,000 NFTs, each of which is associated with a unique CryptoPunks image. Everyone knows who owns each CryptoPunks NFT. The Ethereum blockchain provides indelible proof. But people disagree about who owns - and who should own - the copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Most CryptoPunks NFT owners believe they should own the copyright in the image associated with …

Protecting Fair Use From Algorithms, Internet Platforms, And The Copyright Office: A Critique Of The § 512 Study, Mary Kate Sherwood

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

In 1994, the Supreme Court of the United States held that a musical group’s parody of a well-known song could be fair use, which is a noninfringing use of copyrighted content. In 2006, the Second Circuit found that an artist’s use of copyrighted photographs in his own artwork constituted fair use. In 2016, the Ninth Circuit found that a video of a child dancing to a short clip of a copyrighted Prince song could be fair use. But in 2022, a creator who attempts to share her fair use of copyrighted material online may not have recourse to the …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Scholars In Support Of Defendants-Appellees, Rebecca Tushnet, Laura A. Heymann

Briefs

No abstract provided.

Sound Familiar? Digital Sampling Is Taking Center Stage, Logan Zucchino

University of Miami Business Law Review

In 2018, Kendrick Duckworth, better known by his stage-name Kendrick Lamar, became the first non-classical or jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Equally as surprising, the album contained a magnitude of digital sampling. As digital sampling has become more prevalent since the 1980’s, courts have differed on how to handle the issue. By 2016, the Sixth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals established a circuit split on the issue, with one holding that unlicensed digital sampling is per se unlawful, and the other holding that a more lenient test is needed. Courts have continued to struggle with …

“Sorry,” But I Didn’T Release It: How The Court’S Analysis Of The Fair Use Doctrine In Chapman V. Maraj Protects Innovation And Creativity In The Music Industry, Samantha Ross

University of Miami Business Law Review

The fair use doctrine is an important affirmative defense to copyright infringement when a particular use does not interfere with copyright law’s primary goal of promoting creativity for the public good. Artists and songwriters frequently experiment with copyrighted music without permission before seeking licensing approval from the original rights holders to “sample” or “replay” the work. In Chapman v. Maraj—a copyright infringement suit brought by Tracy Chapman against Nicki Minaj—the United States District Court for the Central District of California held that experimenting with a copyrighted musical composition for the purpose of creating a new work with an intent to …

Paper Of Record: Modernizing Ownership Disclosures For U.S. Patents, Jonathan Stroud, Levi Lall

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Heirs Property: Why Certain Musical Copyrights Should Be Included In The Heirs Property Reform Movement, Austin Weatherly

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

The modern heirs property reform movement seeks to ameliorate the issues caused by the procedures governing the inheritance of real property from landowners who die intestate. This procedure can have a negative impact on heirs and the value of their inherited property. The reform movement, as it stands, only seeks to resolve the issues created by these procedures in the real property context. The rhetorical basis for the modern heirs property reform movement largely focuses on closing the racial wealth gap in the United States and slowing the wealth bleed from one black generation to the next. Many of the …

Patent Performativity, Dan L. Burk

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

Gender bias is rife in the patent system; a large and growing body of empirical literature demonstrates the exclusion of women from the patent system at every level. Such pervasive marginalization cannot be explained by the paucity of women in STEM fields. Rather, more fundamental discriminatory mechanisms must be at work. In this paper I examine one aspect of such biases, arguing that patents operate as performatives, that is, as social assemblages that enact what they disclose, and that create their own social facts. To demonstrate patent performativity, I briefly trace the development of performative concepts, from Austinian declarations, through …

Bright Stars Or Unreliable Compasses: Navigating Patent Definiteness During The Fourth Industrial Revolution, N. Thane Bauz

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

This Article traces the evolution of the definiteness requirement over the course of two centuries. From the time of inventions relating to flour mills, the definiteness requirement evolved into the consequence for drafting uninterpretable claims. Without considering the reasons for this evolution, the Supreme Court in its Nautilus decision returned the standard for assessing definiteness to its root form. Given the consequences are the loss of patent rights, this Article grapples with the Supreme Court’s decision during an era where complex and convergent technologies are more commonplace. The Article also analyzes empirical evidence six years before and six years after …

Defensive Industrial Policy: Cybersecurity Interventions To Reduce Intellectual Property Theft, Dr. Chad Dacus, Dr. Carl (Cj) Horn

Military Cyber Affairs

Through cyber-enabled industrial espionage, China has appropriated what Keith Alexander, the former Director of the National Security Agency, dubbed “the largest transfer of wealth in history.” Although China disavows intellectual property (IP) theft by its citizens and has set self-sustained research and development as an important goal, it is unrealistic to believe IP theft will slow down meaningfully without changing China’s decision calculus. China and the United States have twice agreed, in principle, to respect one another’s IP rights. However, these agreements have lacked any real enforcement mechanism, so the United States must do more to ensure its IP is …

Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia Garcia

Vanderbilt Law Review

Patent law and copyright law are widely understood to diverge in how they approach prior art, the universe of information that already existed before a particular innovation's development. For patents, prior art is paramount. An invention can't be patented unless it is both novel and nonobvious when viewed against the backdrop of all the earlier inventions that paved the way. But for copyrights, prior art is supposed to be virtually irrelevant. Black-letter copyright doctrine doesn't care if a creative work happens to resemble its predecessors, only that it isn't actually copied from them. In principle, then, outside of the narrow …

Cannabis, Consumers, And The Trademark Laundering Trap, Viva R. Moffat, Sam Kamin, Tim Maffett

William & Mary Law Review

At the moment, cannabis companies cannot acquire federal trademark protection for their marijuana products because the ''lawful use" doctrine limits trademark registration to goods lawfully sold in commerce. Given that marijuana remains illegal under federal law, this may not sound like much of a problem, but it has serious consequences for consumers. Without trademark rights, one cannabis company can simply use the brand name of another, more prominent, company on its marijuana products, and consumers will assume that they are getting the products they have come to rely on, with potentially dangerous results. The current approach of the United States …

Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia Garcia

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Patent law and copyright law are widely understood to diverge in how they approach prior art, the universe of information that already existed before a particular innovation’s development. For patents, prior art is paramount. An invention can’t be patented unless it is both novel and nonobvious when viewed against the backdrop of all the earlier inventions that paved the way. But for copyrights, prior art is supposed to be virtually irrelevant. Black-letter copyright doctrine doesn’t care if a creative work happens to resemble its predecessors, only that it isn’t actually copied from them. In principle, then, outside of the narrow …

The (Unnoticed) Revitalization Of The Doctrine Of Equivalents, Daryl Lim

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Over the past century, few patent issues have been considered so often by the Supreme Court of the United States as the doctrine of equivalents (“DOE”). This judge-made rule deals with a question that lies at the heart of patent policy—what is the best way to define property rights in an invention? The doctrine gives patentees an opportunity to ensnare an accused device that does not literally infringe a patent claim if the accused device is substantially similar to each claim limitation. Patentees enjoy this advantage, but it comes at a cost to the public, who must face the …

Paths To Downstream Innovation, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

All innovation is "downstream innovation" - research that builds on prior discoveries. Patent law has an outsized influence on downstream innovation because such innovation often falls within the scope of an in-force upstream patent. In these cases, innovators cannot conduct even the most basic research towards downstream technologies without addressing the upstream patent. Because upstream patents block downstream research, and it is often impractical to license the upstream patent, downstream researchers frequently exploit a group of doctrines that permit research to proceed even in the presence of an otherwise blocking patent.

This Article presents the first systematic review of the …

Sy-Stem-Ic Bias: An Exploration Of Gender And Race Representation On University Patents, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

People of color and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (“STEM”) fields in the United States. Through both intentional and unintentional structural barriers, universities continue to lose valuable intellectual resources by perpetuating a lack of gender, racial, and ethnic diversity as people climb the academic ladder. Identifying racial and gender disparities between university campus populations and their patent representation quantifies the qualitatively observed systemic racism and sexism plaguing STEM. Although many have written about racial and gender underrepresentation in STEM, no author has ever endeavored to simultaneously quantify the racial and gender gap at universities in the …

The Way Lawyers Worked, Michael Risch, Mike Viney

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Court and litigation operations are opaque in the best of times, and the lack of explanatory Nineteenth Century legal records makes it even more difficult to learn how lawyers and judges went about their business. This may be one of the reasons there are so few accounts detailing the nuts and bolts of 1800s law practice. This Article illuminates the development of litigation and the law in the middle of the Nineteenth Century by examining archival court and Patent Office records.

Most accounts of the time focus either on judicial opinions or the relationship of the parties, but few articles …

Possessing Intangibles, João Marinotti

Northwestern University Law Review

The concept of possession is currently considered inapplicable to intangible assets, whether data, cryptocurrency, or NFTs. Under this view, intangible assets categorically fall outside the purview of property law’s foundational doctrines. Such sweeping conclusions stem from a misunderstanding of the role of possession in property law. This Article refutes the idea that possession constitutes—or even requires—physical control by distinguishing possession from another foundational concept, that of thinghood. It highlights possession’s unique purpose within the property process: conveying the status of in rem claims. In property law, the concept of possession conveys to third parties the allocation of property rights and …

New Innovation Models In Medical Ai, W Nicholson Price Ii, Rachel E. Sachs, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

In recent years, scientists and researchers have devoted considerable resources to developing medical artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Many of these technologies—particularly those that resemble traditional medical devices in their functions—have received substantial attention in the legal and policy literature. But other types of novel AI technologies, such as those related to quality improvement and optimizing use of scarce facilities, have been largely absent from the discussion thus far. These AI innovations have the potential to shed light on important aspects of health innovation policy. First, these AI innovations interact less with the legal regimes that scholars traditionally conceive of as …

This Content Is Unavailable In Your Geographic Region: The United States' And The European Union's Implementation Of Anti-Circumvention Measures, Kyle Berry

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Recently, people streaming movies and TV shows have begun to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to access content that streaming services restrict to certain geographic regions. Because of the ambiguity in international law and the implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty, domestic law fails to offer streaming services a recourse to sue foreign VPN users. The WIPO Copyright Treaty established an anti-circumvention provision that would seem to apply to using VPNs to stream from other countries. But because of the provision's ambiguity, many of the WIPO Copyright Treaty member countries have adopted different standards. This problem …