Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

#Freebritney: The Importance Of Public Access To The Guardianship System, Cecily D'Amore

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The note examines the systemic issues in the U.S. guardianship system, highlighted by Britney Spears' highly publicized conservatorship case, and advocates for increased transparency and accountability. It argues that while guardianship laws are designed to protect vulnerable individuals, cases like Spears' reveal gaps in oversight, inconsistent public access to records, and the need for less restrictive alternatives. The note proposes reforms, including enhanced public access to guardianship case information and the creation of a centralized database, to address these shortcomings and prevent abuse.

Mechanical Licenses And The Willing Buyer/Willing Seller Standard: Establishing Royalty Rates In A Vacuum Of Knowledge, Natalie Linn

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The Music Modernization Act (MMA) introduced a significant shift in determining mechanical royalty rates by replacing the 801(b)(1) standard with the willing buyer-willing seller standard. This change, while aiming to establish fair market value, presents challenges for the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) due to the lack of a comparable market and the influence of statutory licensing. The transition is expected to increase royalty rates, impacting various stakeholders, including copyright owners, streaming services, and consumers, and may lead to heightened disputes and uncertainty in the industry.

Any Port In A Storm: What Social Media Platforms Should Do To Address The Shifting Legal Tides Governing Content Embedding, Laura Cohen

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Uncovering Patent Prosecution: An Obvious(Ness) Negotiation, Orit Fischman-Afori, Yifat Nahmias, Iris Soroker

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Because a patent is a license for a monopoly affecting the public good, the process of patent prosecution deserves close scrutiny. Yet, significant aspects of this process remain unexplored. In particular, two central thresholds for patent eligibility, "novelty" and "nonobviousness," regarded as the bedrock of patent law worldwide, have rarely been examined on an empirical basis. Investigating how these requirements are invoked during the patent prosecution process is critical to understanding how the application of patent law's central tenets affects the quantity and quality of the resulting patents and, ultimately, the public interest.

In this empirical study, we examine a …

Autumn Is Coming: A Novel Liability Theory That May Kill Pharmaceutical Evergreening, Uri Y. Hacohen

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Pharmaceutical evergreening-attempts by brand-name manufacturers to leverage patent rights to artificially extend legal protection for drugs-is among the most pressing and unresolved public policy challenges of our time. On July 14, 2021, in Sanofi et al. vs. Unipharm Ltd., the Israeli Supreme Court adopted a novel and internationally unprecedented legal policy to combat the evergreening pandemic. By using its equitable powers, the Israeli court empowered a generic manufacturer, Unipharm, to claim on behalf of the public interest the wrongly obtained monopoly profits that a brand-name manufacturer, Sanofi, obtained by improperly leveraging its improvement patent to impair generic market entry. This …

Examining The Fourth Amendment And Biometric Data Privacy Law Implications Of Ncaa Athletes' Mandated Use Of Athlete Biometric Data Tracking Devices, Alicia Jessop

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

This Article presents the first in-depth analysis of the privacy law implications, under both the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and individual states' biometric data privacy laws, resulting from National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) member institutions mandating that athletes wear athlete biometric data (ABD) tracking devices. The Article provides the NCAA' and its member institutions, athletes, and Congress with recommendations of how to respond to the privacy law concerns that exist in a period of expanded ABD collection, use, and storage. Part I discusses the growing practice of athletics departments requiring intercollegiate athletes to wear ABD tracking devices. …

Panel 4: Cultural Property And International Human Rights Trends, Sandy Cobden, Leila Amineddoleh, Kristen A. Carpenter, Lawrence Kaye

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

The article examines the challenges and trends in recognizing the human rights dimension of cultural property claims, particularly for Indigenous Peoples. It highlights the intersection of social, ethical, and legal dynamics in repatriation efforts, emphasizing the need for international cooperation and the development of effective mechanisms to address these claims. The analysis underscores the importance of considering Indigenous Peoples' laws, traditions, and customs in repatriation processes and advocates for diplomatic approaches over litigation.

Something For Nothing: Untangling A Knot Of Section 230 Solutions, Nicholas Bradley

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Social media platforms have become the dominant public forum of the modern age but there is a big problem: they are privately owned and can moderate content however they like. This right is protected both by the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the latter of which creates immunity from suit for platforms that exercise their right to moderate content by removing—or not removing—objectionable content. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have complained that platforms are abusing this immunity and, while they have put forward a wide variety of legislative solutions, none of them have …

Third Amendment To The Chinese Copyright Law, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Since July 2011, China has actively explored ways to upgrade its copyright law. Although the law was already amended the year before, only two changes were made at that time. The last time Chinese copyright law undertook a major overhaul was more than two decades ago, two months before the country became the 143rd member of the WTO in December 2001.

On November 11, 2020, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China finally approved the Third Amendment to the Chinese Copyright Law. Covering a wide range of issues from eligibility to ownership and from enforcement to anti-circumvention …

Unauthorized And Unwise: The Lawful Use Requirement In Trademark Law, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For decades, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO") has required trademark owners to comply with sundry nontrademark laws governing the sale of their trademarked goods and services. Pursuant to this "lawful use requirement," the Agency has refused or even cancelled registration of thousands of marks used on everything from Schedule 1 controlled substances to mislabeled soap. This Article subjects the Agency's lawful use requirement to long-overdue scrutiny. It suggests that in requiring compliance with other laws for registration, the PTO has lost sight of the one statute it is supposed to administer. In the process, the Agency has …

A Compulsory Solution To The Machine Problem, Cole G. Merritt

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already disrupting and will likely continue to disrupt many industries. Despite the role AI already plays, AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful. Ultimately, these systems may become a powerful tool that can lead to the discovery of important inventions or significantly reduce the time required to discover these inventions. Even now, AI systems are independently inventing. However, the resulting AI-generated inventions are unable to receive patent protection under current US patent law. This unpatentability may lead to inefficient results and ineffectively serves the goals of patent law.

To embrace the development and power of AI, Congress …

Covax: A Primer To International Efforts In Vaccine Distribution And Inequities, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

I have a slightly different view from Dr. Oke in regard to his doubts regarding the utility of a waiver. To the extent that the precedent that we are looking at is whether or not there could be a waiver for countries that lack domestic manufacturing capabilities, to instead import a cheaper generic drug of the Covid vaccines that could be produced in other countries, mainly the particular hubs, such as in India and China, that is still an open question, and part of the proposal that is up before the TRIPS council involves that dimension and that aspect of …

The Value In Secrecy, Camilla Hrdy

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Trade secret law is seen as the most inclusive of intellectual property regimes. So long as information can be kept secret, the wisdom goes, it can be protected under trade secret law, even if patent and copyright protections are unavailable. But keeping it a secret does not magically transform information into a trade secret. The information must also derive economic value from being kept secret from others. This elusive statutory requirement—called “independent economic value”—might at first glance seem redundant, especially in the context of litigation. After all, if information had no value, why would the plaintiff have bothered to keep …

Trademark Law And Consumer Constraints, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Trademark law’s focus is on the consumer. Both the trademark literature and the marketing literature, however, tend to assume a consumer with few constraints on economic or cognitive processing resources. For example, scholars have argued that some confusion in the marketplace is not only inevitable but is also an overall positive in that encountering confusion trains consumers to be more resourceful and to learn how to interpret marketing communications more carefully. But not all consumers have the same level of cognitive and economic resources. Disadvantaged consumers—such as those not literate in the English language, those with lower socioeconomic status, and …

Of Autonomy, Sacred Rights, And Personal Marks, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

This Response examines three different senses in which the idea of autonomy might operate within trademark law’s rules relating to personal marks (i.e., marks that identity an individual) and shows that each of them is critically incomplete or too weak to independently sustain the justificatory burden for the domain. It then examines the worrisome possibility that courts’ allusions to autonomy here are little more than a trope for other considerations. It finally looks at how a genuine commitment to autonomy might be integrated into the principally market-driven framework of trademark law.

The Genius Of Common-Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Among Richard Epstein’s influential contributions to legal scholarship over the years is his writing on common-law intellectual property. In it, we see his attempt to meld the innate logic of the common law’s conceptual structure with the realities of the modern information economy. Common-law intellectual property refers to different judge-made causes of action that create forms of exclusive rights and privileges in intangibles, interferences that are then rendered enforceable through private liability. In this essay, I examine Epstein’s writing on two such doctrines, hot-news misappropriation and cybertrespass, which embrace several important ideas to which modern discussions of intellectual property would …

Intellectual Property, Independent Creation, And The Lockean Commons, Mala Chatterjee

Faculty Scholarship

Copyrights and patents are differently structured intellectual property rights in different kinds of entities. Nonetheless, they are widely regarded by U.S. scholars as having the same theoretical underpinnings. Though scholars have sought to connect philosophical theories of property to intellectual property, with a particular interest in the labor theory of John Locke, these explorations have not sufficiently probed copyrights’ and patents’ doctrinal differences or their philosophical implications for the theories explored. This Article argues that a defining difference between copyrights and patents has normative significance for the framework of Lockean property theory: namely, that copyright law treats independent creation as …

The Institutionalist Turn In Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

The institutionalist turn refers to the reality that over the last decade and a half, the Court’s copyright jurisprudence has come to focus less and less on directly resolving substantive issues within the landscape of copyright doctrine. It has instead become a principal site of debate and disagreement over issues that have a direct bearing on the role, competence, and legitimacy of the Court within the copyright system. The institutionalist turn does not imply that the Court’s decisions have altogether avoided engaging substantive copyright issues; merely that its engagement of copyright doctrine has come to be intertwined with — and …

Floors And Ceilings In International Copyright Treaties: Berne/Trips/Wct Minima And Maxima, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This paper addresses “floors” – minimum substantive international protections, and “ceilings” – maximum substantive international protections, set out in the Berne Convention and subsequent multilateral copyright accords. While much scholarship has addressed Berne minima, the “maxima” have generally received less attention. This Comment first describes the general structure of the Berne Convention, TRIPS and WCT regarding these contours, and then analyzes their application to the recent “press publishers’ right” promulgated in the 2019 EU Digital Single Market Directive. Within the universe of multilateral copyright obligations, the Berne maxima (prohibition of protection for facts and news of the day), buttressed by …

Proving Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Peter S. Menell

Faculty Scholarship

Proof that a defendant actually copied from a copyrighted work is a critical part of a claim for copyright infringement. Indeed, absent such copying, there is no infringement. The most common method of proving copying involves the use of circumstantial evidence, consisting of proof that a defendant had “access” to the protected work, and a showing of “similarities” between the copy and the protected work. In inferring copying from the combination of such evidence, courts have for many decades developed a framework known as the “inverse ratio rule,” which allows them to modulate the level of proof needed on access …

Copyright, Creativity, Big Media And Cultural Value: Incorporating The Author, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value is a wide-ranging work of immense erudition and archival research, combining several historical studies of the ‘incorporation’ of the author in different sectors of the ‘creative industries’. The book’s subtitle, ‘Incorporating the Author’, astutely encompasses multiple meanings, whose implications the book works through. These include the author as an initiating participant in a larger economic structure (Chapter 3 (print publishing)). But also, the author as a bit player enveloped by a larger economic structure (Chapter 5 (film industry)). And the author (or performer) as an autonomous object of economic value (Chapters …

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. …

Synchronizing Copyright And Technology: A New Paradigm For Sync Rights, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

Embedded in a copyright owner’s musical work or sound recording is the synchronization, or sync right. One of the least discussed aspects of music copyright, considerations about sync have come to the fore as the world has increasingly moved from the real world to the virtual. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred thousands of activities and events to go online. With many of these involving music, the shift to the virtual world has raised new questions about the extent of sync rights.

Traditionally, sync rights were meant to require licenses for the use of music in timed-relation to a film or …

Masthead, Lead Article Editor

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Lead Article Editor

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Moonshots, Matthew Wansley

Articles

In the last half-century, technological progress has stagnated. Rapid advances in information technology disguise the slow pace of productivity growth in other fields. Reigniting technological progress may require firms to invest in moonshots—long-term projects to commercialize innovations. Yet all but a few giant tech firms shy away from moonshots, even when the expected returns would justify the investment. The root of the problem is corporate structure. The process of developing a novel technology does not generate the kind of interim feedback that shareholders need to monitor managers and managers need to motivate employees. Managers who anticipate these agency problems invest …

Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp

Articles

The America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) created a robust administrative system-the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)-that provides a route for challenging the validity of granted patents outside of district courts. Congress determined that administrative adjudication of the validity of initial patent grants could be cheaper and more scientifically accurate than district court adjudication of such validity.

For private economic value per patent, few areas of technology can match the biopharmaceutical industry. This is particularly true for small-molecule drugs. A billion-dollar drug monopoly may be protected from competition by a relatively small number of patents. Accordingly, the social cost …

Whose Progress?, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress shall have power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” These words have been the subject of countless books and scholarly articles. Professor Silbey’s engaging contribution [in Against Progress: Intellectual Property Law and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age] to the conversation focuses on one word—progress—and what it should mean as we think about intellectual property law’s motivations and justifications in the twenty-first century.

But even …

Blockchain Disruption: Digital Assets Are Changing How We Do Business, Nick Curley

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Digital assets are changing the way businesses think about equity, labor, business models, and business organization. Digital assets, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, provide incredible opportunities to further align shareholders with the objectives of the entity.

Each time humanity advances its technology for ledgers, markets explode, and we witness immense wealth creation. Digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the next great step forward for ledger technology. While there are incredible opportunities to leverage this new technology, there are also incredible risks. There are many public examples of “hacks” of prominent blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Blockchain technology has captured the …

Intangible Justice? Intellectual Property Disputes And Canadian Small Claims Courts, Anthony D. Rosborough, Reagan Seidler

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article investigates the jurisdiction and institutional competence of Canadian small claims courts and tribunals with respect to complex claims, and in particular, intellectual property (IP) claims. Recent research points to an increase in these types of claims. A doctrinal analysis finds small claims bodies have wide jurisdiction over intellectual property infringement, contract, and licensing disputes. They can also rule on issues of validity, though they cannot affect registrations in the databases of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Remedies including damages, accountings, and the recovery of infringing goods are available in many provinces. As to their capacity, the article assesses …