Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

A Modern Reconceptualization Of Copyrights As Public Rights, Matthew L. Pangle

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Copyright law is at a crossroads. In the wake of Oil States Energy Servs., LLC v. Greene’s Energy Grp., LLC, the patent, copyright, and intellectual property regimes as a whole, are primed for a modern reconceptualization. At the heart of this reconceptualization is the distinction between public rights, those vindicated by public offices for the public good, and private rights, those vindicated by private citizens for their exclusive government-granted monopolies. Thanks to Oil States, patent rights now exist in two separate bundles-—a public bundle including the patent grant itself and a private bundle consisting of a patent owner’s exclusivity rights. …

France's Organisme De Défense Et De Gestion: A Model For Farmer Collective Action Through Standard Development And Brand Management, Christopher J. Bardenhagen, Philip H. Howard, Marie-Odile Noziéres-Petit

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Quality-based food production, often with a regional dimension, can provide farmers with new, value added markets. It can also provide consumers with access to place based high-quality products, and may benefit local economies through increased commerce. French Organismes de Défense et de Gestion (ODGs) illustrate a mode of quality-based agri-food business organization. ODGs focus on the development of production standards, as well as management of the intellectual property related to those standards. This mode, which is commonly used in Europe, has not often been used in the United States, despite its potential for regional food system development. The ODG mode …

Vaccine Clinical Trials And Data Infrastructure, Ana Santos Rutschman

Utah Law Review

We find ourselves at a momentous turn in the history of vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a quasi-global vaccine race that not only compressed vaccine research and development (R&D) timelines, but also paved the way for the administration of a new type of vaccine technology – mRNA vaccines, which work in substantially different ways from the vaccines in use before the pandemic.

While the process of bringing emerging COVID-19 vaccines to market has taken place in an unusually short timeframe, it was largely predicated on the same scientific and regulatory processes that govern the development, approval and deployment of new …

A Typology Of Disclosure, Sharon K. Sandeen

Akron Law Review

Information and data have always been valuable to businesses, but in the Information Age, as businesses have figured out more ways to commoditize the information and data they possess, there has been a corresponding increase in expressed concerns about the unauthorized “disclosure” of information. Often, these concerns are expressed in absolute terms, as if any unauthorized disclosure of information constitutes an act of unfair competition or theft. The problem is that the common understanding of disclosure, particularly among information owners that seek to restrict access to the information they possess, belies the legal meaning of the term as used in …

Striking The Right Balance: Following The Doj's Lead For Innovation In Standardized Technology, Kristen Osenga

Akron Law Review

Today’s technology standards are the result of an extraordinary amount of innovation, collaboration and competition. These concepts are interrelated, and each is enhanced or enabled by intellectual property. Where these three concepts come together in standards development, it is unsurprising that antitrust concerns are also present. Specifically, the interests of contributors, participants, and implementers must be fairly balanced to ensure that the appropriate types and levels of innovation, collaboration, and competition can occur—and that the public will benefit. It is important that antitrust enforcement involving standards development organizations and owners of standards essential patents recognize the careful balance of these …

After The Trolls: Patent Litigation As Ex Post Market-Making, Robert Merges

Akron Law Review

Patent policy has been dominated lately by efforts to reduce rent-seeking patent troll litigation. As recent reforms begin to take effect, it is timely to consider the more constructive aspects of patent litigation. This Article contends that the lag between product development and patent litigation, which pushes the problem of patent valuation into the ex post (after product development) period, serves just such a positive function. Re-search, development, and product roll-out can all take place first. Then, at a later stage, patent litigation sorts out the relative merits and contributions of the various inventors and competitors who contributed to the …

Emotions And Intellectual Property Law, Margaret Chon

Akron Law Review

Emotions constitute an integral part of the diverse approaches that we bring to bear upon our most pressing law and policy issues. This article explores the role of emotions in intellectual property, information, and technology law (IP). Like other areas of law, IP commits to, prioritizes, and even honors, reason, logic, and facts—which can result in the sidelining of the affective components of law. Yet our affective responses to legal and other phenomena influence both cognition and reason. Part I of the article provides a general overview of the field of law and emotions, pointing out how this approach to …

Copyrighting Tiktok Dances: Choreography In The Internet Age, Ali Johnson

Washington Law Review

TikTok is a video-sharing social media application that launched in 2018 and has grown wildly since its inception. Many users are drawn to the platform by “dance challenges”—short dance routines of varying complexity set to popular songs that are recreated by other users, eventually going “viral” (i.e., recreated on a massive scale by other users) on the app. Going viral can provide young dancers and choreographers an opportunity to break into the highly competitive entertainment industry. However, there is a problem: due to TikTok’s interface and community practices, the original creators of a dance (who, significantly, are often young women …

Games Without Frontiers: The Increasing Importance Of Intellectual Property Rights In The People’S Republic Of China, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property (“IP”) protection in the People's Republic of China has been murky and amorphous. The country is currently enjoying a historic era with significant infrastructure and investment projects occurring as the Chinese consumer society substantially expands. These simultaneous trends require that China commit to the securitization and protection of IP rights to sustain its rapid economic growth.

Trademark, Labor Law, And Antitrust, Oh My!, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

I am allergic to antitrust law, but after reading Hiba Hafiz’s recent article, I understand that my aversion is problematic. This paper combines an analysis of trademark law, labor law, and antitrust law to explain how employers exploit trademark law protections and defenses to control labor markets and underpay and under-protect workers. For most IP lawyers and professors, this article will open our minds to some collateral effects of trademark law’s consumer protection rationale on other areas of law with important consequences for economic and social policies.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Intellectual Property Jurisprudence, Ryan Vacca, Ann Bartow

Faculty Publications

On September 18, 2020, the world lost an irreplaceable leader. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after many years of battling cancer, had passed away. Although she will primarily be remembered for her work on gender equality—as both advocate and jurist—Justice Ginsburg signiicantly impacted other areas of the law. One such area is intellectual property. During her time on the U.S. Supreme Court, she authored 20 opinions in these areas—11 copyright, seven patent, and two trademark—and joined the opinions of her colleagues in many others.

Protecting Patent Owners From Infringement By The States: Will The Intellectual Property Rights Restoration Act Of 1999 Finally Satisfy The Court?, Brandon White

Akron Law Review

The Intellectual Property Rights Restoration Act of 1999 (IPRRA), a Senate Bill currently making its way through Congress, seeks to provide a remedy for patent infringement by the states that Supreme Court will find constitutional. In this Comment, Part II will explore the history of state sovereign immunity under both the Eleventh Amendment and the common law. Part III examines Senate Bill 1835, also known as the Intellectual Property Rights Restoration Act of 1999. Part III looks at not only the substantive provisions of the IPRRA, but also at the legal arguments and policy concerns that support the Act. Part …

Intellectual Property Through A Non-Western Lens: Patents In Islamic Law, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Georgia State University Law Review

The intersection of secular, Western intellectual property law and Islamic law is undertheorized in legal scholarship. Yet the nascent and developing non-Western law of one form of intellectual property—patents—in Islamic legal systems is profoundly important for transformational innovation and economic development initiatives of Muslim-majority countries that comprise nearly one-fifth of the world’s population.

Recent scholarship highlights the tensions of intellectual property in Islamic law because religious considerations in an Islamic society do not fully align with Western notions of patents. As Islamic legal systems have begun to embrace patents in recent decades, theories of patents have presented conceptual and theological …

Originality's Other Path, Joseph A. Fishman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Drawing on original archival research, this Article challenges the standard account of what originality doctrine is and what courts can do with it. It identifies Nelson's forgotten copyright legacy: a still-growing line of cases that treats music differently, sometimes even more analogously to patentable inventions than to other authorial works. These decisions seem to function as a hidden enclave within originality's larger domain, playing by rules that others couldn't get away with. They form originality's other path, much less trod than the familiar one but with a doctrinal story of its own to tell. Originality and nonobviousness's parallel beginnings reveal …

Governing The Unknown: How The Development Of Intellectual Property Law In Space Will Shape The Next Great Era Of Exploration, Exploitation, And Invention, Lauren Peterson

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property, Secrets, And Declassified Information. Mastering United States Government Information: Sources And Services, Christopher C. Brown, Libraries Unlimited, 2020., Suzanne Reinman

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

No abstract provided.

Code Ownership : Plagiarism And Use, Alexis Nicole Amore

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Technology is moving at unmeasurable rates to that of law. Ownership rights and legality become harder to grasp distant theories. With community code-sharing and limiting language structures, when does code become plagiarized or entity-owned? The disciplines of Cyberlaw and computer science are used to provide a better understanding.

The Cyberlaw discipline explores how jurisdiction views cyberspace, source code, and source code’s placement within legislation. Due to cyberspace’s ever-evolving nature, litigation struggles to encompass the possibilities within it. Computer science delves into theory-based excursions that define the law’s shape in the cyber realm. It bolsters the possibility of implementing progressive legislation …

Note: Patentability Of 3d Printed Biomaterials, Nicole Barba

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

The Congressional criteria for patentability, detailed in 35 U.S.C §§101-03, states that an invention must be novel, useful, and nonobvious. In addition to these requirements, the Judiciary requires that the invention not be classified as a law of nature, natural phenomenon, or abstract idea. The purpose of each of these criterion is to ensure that patents are granted only to inventions that “promote the Progress of . . . useful Arts.” As new technologies emerge, it is unclear whether these judicially created criteria still serve that purpose or whether the criteria are overly expansive such that truly useful inventions are …

Ignoring Information Quality, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Entry into the patent system is guarded by an examination process to screen out applications that impose undue costs on the public without commensurate benefit. To do this, patent examiners rely heavily on various pieces of information-both provided by the patent applicant and independently discovered by the examiner-to assess whether an application should be granted. This Article shows that there are few mechanisms at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for questioning the veracity of this information, even though it may be incorrect. Rather, patent examination often assumes that existence of information equals accuracy of information. Consequently, examiners may rely …

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

Law & Economics Working Papers

In recent years, scientists and researchers have devoted considerable resources to developing medical artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Many of these technologies—particularly those which 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 that relate 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 …

United States Supreme Court Ip Cases, 1810–2019: Measuring & Mapping The Citation Networks, Joseph Scott Miller

Catholic University Law Review

Intellectual property law in the United States, though shaped by key statutes, has long been a common-law field to a great degree. Many decades of decisional law flesh out the meaning of broad-textured, sparely worded statutes. Given the key roles of patent law and copyright law, both federal, the Supreme Court of the United States is i.p. law’s leading apex court. What are the major topical currents in the Supreme Court’s i.p. cases, both now and over the course of the Court’s work? This study uses network-analysis tools to measure and map the entirety of the Court’s i.p. jurisprudence. It …

The Extent Of Application Of The General Rules For The Protection Of Intellectual Works Stored Through Cloud Computing: A Study In Uae Legislation, Alaa Khasawneh

UAEU Law Journal

This research focuses on the most important legal problems raised by cloud computing services and its applications, especially the protection of content stored through these applications. Some legislations have organized these risks with special laws relating to personal data. The study concluded that the Emirati legislator should trait the legal aspects of cloud computing and create its own legal framework.

Keywords: Cloud computing, intellectual property, terms of service.

Evidence-Based Patent Damages, Taorui Guan

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Is There A New Extraterritoriality In Intellectual Property?., Timothy R. Holbrook

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property rights are territorially limited. In the main, these rights do not extend outside of the country who has afforded parties the intellectual property. Instead, they are limited to activities within the country. Or so the theory goes. In the global marketplace, such territorial rights do not map well onto the commercial realities of many companies. Given the global marketplace and the intangible-yet-territorial nature of intellectual property rights, IP has sat squarely in the middle of concerns about extraterritoriality.

The Supreme Court has long articulated the presumption against the extraterritorial application of U.S. law. This is not to say …

The Research Patent, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law Review

The patent system gives courts the discretion to tailor patentability standards flexibly across technologies to provide optimal incentives for innovation. For chemical inventions, the courts deem them unpatentable if the chemical lacks a practical, non-research-based use at the time patent protection is sought. The fear is that an early-stage patent on a research input would confer too much control over yet-unknown uses for the chemical, thereby potentially hindering downstream innovation. Yet, denying patents on research inputs can frustrate patent law’s broad goal of protecting and promoting scientific and technological advances.

This Article addresses this problem by proposing a new form …

Whole Designs, Sarah Burstein

University of Colorado Law Review

In the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of patentable subject matter-that is, what kinds of things can you get a patent for? But this attention has, to date, been focused on utility patents, the patents that protect how things work. There has been scant attention paid to statutory subject matter and design patents, the patents that protect how things look. These patents have gained prominence in both practice and scholarship since the $1 billion verdict in Apple v. Samsung. The time has come to take the question of design patentable subject matter seriously. Today, …

Attitudes Towards Ip Present Among Seattle Craft Breweries, Zahr K. Said

Articles

No abstract provided.

Conundra Of The Berne Convention Concept Of The Country Of Origin, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores one of the most important, but occasionally intractable, issues under the Berne Convention, the concept of Country of Origin. Article 5(4) of that treaty defines a work’s country of origin, but leaves out several situations, leaving those who interpret and apply the treaty without guidance in ascertaining the country of origin. I will call those situations the “Conundra of the country of origin,” and will explore two of them here. First, what is the country of origin of an unpublished work whose authors are nationals of different countries? Second, what is the country of origin of a …

International Law Association's Guidelines On Intellectual Property And Private International Law ("Kyoto Guidelines"): Applicable Law, Marie-Elodie Ancel, Nicolas Binctin, Josef Drexl, Mireille Van Eechoud, Jane C. Ginsburg, Toshiyuki Kono, Gyooho Lee, Rita Matulionyte, Edouard Treppoz, Dário Moura Vicente

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter “Applicable Law” of the International Law Association’s Guidelines on In­tellectual Property and Private International Law (“Kyoto Guidelines”) provides principles on the choice of law in international intellectual property matters. The Guidelines confirm the traditional principle of the lex loci protectionis for the existence, transferabil­ity, scope and infringement of intellectual property rights. The law applicable to the initial ownership of registered rights is governed by the lex loci protec­tionis whereas the law of the closest connection is applied to determine the ownership of copyright. For contracts, freedom of choice is acknowledged. With regard to ubiquitous or multi-state infringement and …

The Trade Secrecy Standard For Patent Prior Art, Camilla A. Hrdy, Sharon K. Sandeen

American University Law Review

A fundamental criterion of patentability is that an invention must be new as compared to the prior art—the corpus of preexisting knowledge and technology already available to the public. If an invention is in the prior art, or rendered obvious by it, it cannot be patented.

The U.S. Patent Act has traditionally envisioned a categorical approach for deciding what counts as prior art. Under this approach, courts are supposed to decide whether a particular disclosure about the invention (a reference) falls within one of the categories listed in Section 102 of the Patent Act, such as “described in a printed …