Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International Public License (Cc By-Nc-Sa 4.0), Creative Commons

Concepts in Animal Parasitology

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

• The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that …

  ---

  Go to article

Intellectual Property, Surrogate Licensing, And Precision Medicine, Jacob S. Sherkow, Jorge L. Contreras

IP Theory

The fruits of the biotechnology revolution are beginning to be harvested. Recent regulatory approvals of a variety of advanced therapies—Keytruda (pembrolizumab), Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel), and patisiran—have ushered in an age of “precision medicine” treatments that target patients’ specific genetic, physiological, and environmental profiles rather than generalized diagnoses of disease. Therapies like these may soon be supplemented by gene editing technologies such as CRISPR, which could enable the targeted eradication of deleterious genetic variants to improve human health. But the intellectual property (IP) surrounding precision therapies and their foundational technology remain controversial. Precision therapies ultimately rely—and are roughly congruent with—basic scientific information …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Ip Preparedness For Outbreak Diseases, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

Outbreaks of infectious diseases will worsen, as illustrated by the recent back-to-back Ebola and Zika epidemics. The development of innovative drugs, especially in the form of vaccines, is key to minimizing future outbreaks, yet current intellectual property (IP) regimes are ineffective in supporting this goal.

IP scholarship has not adequately addressed the role of IP in the development of vaccines for outbreak diseases. This Article fills that void. Through case studies on the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks, it provides the first descriptive analysis of the role of IP from the pre- to the post-outbreak stages, specifically identifying IP inefficiencies. …

Adoption Of The Bayh-Dolye Act In Developed Countries: Added Presure For A Broad Research Exemption In The United States?, Michael S. Mireles

Maine Law Review

Numerous developed countries, most if not all members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Finland, have or are considering adopting legislation similar to the Bayh-Dole Act. These countries apparently believe that passage of legislation similar to the Bayh-Dole Act will lead to the transfer of government funded research results from the university laboratory to the marketplace and other economic activity. In the United States, the birthplace of the Bayh-Dole Act (the Act), it is not entirely clear whether its passage is the direct result …

Measuring The Costs And Benefits Of Patent Pools, Michael Mattioli, Robert P. Merges

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article addresses a policy question that has challenged scholars and lawmakers since the 1850s: Do the transaction cost benefits of patent pools outweigh their potential for consumer harm? This question has special importance today. Patent pools are on the increase, due to large numbers of patents in critical industries such as software and mobile phones. In this Article, we present the first empirically-based estimate of the transaction costs savings engendered by patent pools. Drawing on interviews with administrators of prominent pools, we document the costs of assembling and administering a functioning pool. We then estimate the transaction costs that …

Crispr, Surrogate Licensing, And Scientific Discovery, Jorge Contreras, Jacob S. Sherkow

Other Publications

Several research institutions are embroiled in a legal dispute over the foundational patent rights to CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, and it may take years for their competing claims to be resolved. But even before ownership of the patents is finalized, the institutions behind CRISPR have wasted no time capitalizing on the huge market for this groundbreaking technology by entering into a series of licensing agreements with commercial enterprises. With respect to the potentially lucrative market for human therapeutics and treatments, each of the key CRISPR patent holders has granted exclusive rights to a spinoff or "surrogate" company formed by the institution …

Inventive Steps: The Crispr Patent Dispute And Scientific Progress, Jacob S. Sherkow

Other Publications

Recent decisions by patent offices in the USA and Europe concerning the revolutionary gene-editing technology, CRISPR/Cas9, have shed light on the importance — and puzzles — of one particular area of patent law: “nonobviousness”, as it known in the USA, or, in Europe, the “inventive step”. Patent law does not always neatly align itself with the realities of biological research. But these competing decisions from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office have put those differences on parade. Unpacking these standards for CRISPR tell us a lot about how advances in biology are actually made — …

Puzzles Of The Zero-Rate Royalty, Eli Greenbaum

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Patentees increasingly exploit their intellectual property rights through royalty-free licensing arrangements. Even though patentees using such frameworks forfeit their right to trade patents for monetary gain, royalty-free arrangements can be used to pursue other significant commercial and collaborative interests. This Article argues that modern royalty-free structures generate tension between various otherwise well-accepted doctrines of patent remedies law that were designed for more traditional licensing models. As such, current doctrines provide conflicting frameworks for evaluating the royalty-free arrangement, and offer inconsistent approaches for determining the appropriate remedy for their breach. This discord grows out of courts’ inadequate attention to non-monetary consideration …

Patent Privateers And Antitrust Fears, Matthew Sipe

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Patent trolls are categorically demonized as threatening American innovation and industry. But whether they are a threat that antitrust law is equipped to deal with is a complex question that depends on the particular type of patent troll and activities they engage in. This Article looks specifically at privateer patent trolls: entities that acquire their patents from operating entities and assert them against other industry members. In the particular context of privateering, antitrust law is almost certainly not the proper legal solution. Privateering does raise significant issues: circumventing litigation constraints, evading licensing obligations, and raising the cost and frequency of …

The New Access Right And Its Impact On Libraries And Library Users, Laura N. Gasaway

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Sine Qua Non: Trademark Infringement, Likelihood Of Confusion, And The Business Of Collegiate Licensing, C. Knox Withers

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Copy Game For High Score: The First Video Game Lawsuit, William K. Ford

Georgia Journal of Law & Technology

No abstract provided.

Beyond Eureka: What Creators Want (Freedom, Credit, And Audiences) And How Intellectual Property Can Better Give It To Them (By Supporting, Sharing, Licensing, And Attribution), Colleen Chien

Michigan Law Review

In the theater of the courtroom or the rough and tumble arena of intellectual property policymaking, the day-to-day lives of creators are rarely presented. We often instead see one-dimensional vignettes, for example, “the new artist or band that has just released their [sic] first single and will not be paid for its success,” described on Taylor Swift’s Tumblr last summer when she initially withdrew from Apple’s music streaming service. While instructive, this description leaves out that Swift and other artists have long relied on “free play” mediums like radio and, more recently, YouTube to develop, not cannibalize, their audiences and …

Berne-Forbidden Formalities And Mass Digitization, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay addresses the Berne Convention's prohibition on the imposition of "formalities" on the "enjoyment and the exercise" of copyright, and the compatibility with that cornerstone norm of international endeavors to facilitate mass digitization, notably by means of extended collective licensing and "opt-out" authorizations. In the Berne context, "enjoyment" means the existence and scope of rights; "exercise" means their enforcement. Voluntary provision of copyright notice and of title-searching information on a public register of works and transfers of rights is fully consistent with Berne and should be encouraged. But the Berne Convention significantly constrains member states' ability to impose mandatory …

Facilitating Competition By Remedial Regulation, Kristelia A. García

Publications

In music licensing, powerful music publishers have begun—for the first time ever— to withdraw their digital copyrights from the collectives that license those rights, in order to negotiate considerably higher rates in private deals. At the beginning of the year, two of these publishers commanded a private royalty rate nearly twice that of the going collective rate. This result could be seen as a coup for the free market: Constrained by consent decrees and conflicting interests, collectives are simply not able to establish and enforce a true market rate in the new, digital age. This could also be seen as …

Alice In Wonderland Meets The U.S. Patent System, Jay Dratler Jr.

Akron Law Review

The attached article outlines in some detail why I think it matters in two particular fields—software and business methods—in which the PTO has issued, and the Federal Circuit has upheld, what I think are too many patents on non-inventions. The following remarks take a broader and longer-range view of patents generally.

The first reason why having a properly balanced patent system matters relates to the historical period in which we find ourselves. The world is now in the process of transferring the self-evident benefits of robust innovation, free markets, and free trade from Anglo-American and other advanced societies to the …

Licensing Of Intellectual Property Rights, Mark Joelson

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Testimony Before The House Committee On Energy And Commerce, Hearing On Patent Demand Letter Practices And Solutions, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

A small number of patent holders have been abusing the patent system. These patent holders blanket the country with thousands of letters demanding that the recipients purchase a license for a few thousand dollars or else face an infringement suit. The letters are usually sent to small businesses and nonprofits that do not have the resources to investigate allegations of patent infringement. And the letters often contain false or misleading statements designed to scare the recipient into purchasing a license without investigating the claims of infringement. In an attempt to address this problem, eighteen states have recently passed statutes that, …

Brief Of Thirty-Four Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Appellants: Altera Corp. V. Papst Licensing Gmbh, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

The amici curiae are law professors who teach and write on civil procedure and/or patent law and policy. As such, amici are interested in the effective functioning of the courts and the patent system in general. Amici believe that this Court’s rigid rule restricting personal jurisdiction in patent declaratory judgment actions both flouts Supreme Court precedent and frustrates the public policy of clearing invalid patents. Although amici hold different views on other aspects of modern patent law and policy, they are united in their professional opinion that this Court should overturn its inflexible jurisdictional rule.

Backward C Inside A Circle: Free Culture In Zines, Alycia Sellie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with …

One View Of Compulsory Licensing: Comparative Perspectives From India And Canada, Padmanabha Ramanujam, Yugank Goyal

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

None.

Formerly Manufacturing Entities: Piercing The "Patent Troll" Rhetoric, Kristen Jakobsen Osenga

Law Faculty Publications

Everyone hates patent trolls-those companies that "hijack somebody else's idea" and use the patents to "extort some money" from companies that actually make things. But, despite the rhetoric, not all patent trolls are created equal. This Article is the first to focus on one type of patent troll the formerly manufacturing entity. These patent trolls used to make or do something in commerce, but now derive all or a significant portion of their income through licensing their intellectual property. Using case study analysis, this Article demonstrates that formerly manufacturing entities do not impose the harms associated with patent trolls more …

The Gpl Meets The Ucc: Does Free Software Come With A Warranty Of No Infringement Of Patents And Copyrights?, Stephen M. Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

The GNU General Public License, known as the GPL, is the cornerstone of free software. The GPL has served as the organizing document for free software, providing a structure that has helped transformed the development of software and electronic devices. Software licensed under the GPL may be freely copied and adapted. The source code for the software is made available, to enable anyone to study and change it. The GPL does have "copyleft" restrictions, intended to keep the software free for others. If someone adapts and redistributes GPL’d software, they must likewise allow access to their source code. The GPL …

Frand's Forever: Standards, Patent Transfers, And Licensing Commitments, Jay P. Kesan, Carol M. Hayes

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Penalty Default Licenses: A Case For Uncertainty, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article suggests that uncertainty can actually be used to increase efficiency in the marketplace. In the music industry, the battle over terrestrial performance rights--that is, the right of a copyright holder to collect royalties for plays of a sound recording on terrestrial radio--has raged for decades. In June 2012, in a deal that circumvented the statutory license for sound recordings for the …

All Of This Has Happened Before And All Of This Will Happen Again: Innovation In Copyright Licensing, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Claims that copyright licensing can substitute for fair use have a long history. This article focuses on a new cycle of the copyright licensing debate, which has brought revised arguments in favor of universal copyright licensing. First, the new arrangements offered by large copyright owners often purport to sanction the large-scale creation of derivative works, rather than mere reproductions, which were the focus of earlier blanket licensing efforts. Second, the new licenses are often free. Rather than demanding royalties as in the past, copyright owners just want a piece of the action—along with the right to claim that unlicensed uses …

The Granting Clause And Intellectual Property Rights Management In Open-Source Software Licensing, Vikrant N. Vasudeva

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

A Case For The Public Domain, Clark Asay

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several decades open license movements have proven highly successful in the software and content worlds. Such movements rely in part on the belief that greater freedom of use triggers innovative activity that is superior to what a restrictive IP approach produces. Ironically, such open license movements also rely on IP rights to promote their vision of freedom and openness. They do so through IP licenses that, while granting significant freedoms, also impose certain conditions on users such as the “copyleft” requirement in the software world. Such movements rely on this IP-based approach due to fears that, without …