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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics

Intellectual Property Defenses, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky Oct 2013

Intellectual Property Defenses, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Alex Stein

This Article demonstrates that all intellectual property defenses fit into three conceptual categories: general, individualized, and class defenses. A general defense challenges the validity of the plaintiff’s intellectual property right. When raised successfully, it annuls the plaintiff’s right and relieves not only the defendant, but also the entire world of the duty to comply with it. An individualized defense is much narrower in scope: Its successful showing defeats the specific infringement claim asserted by the plaintiff, but leaves the plaintiff’s right intact. Class defenses form an in-between category: They create an immunity zone for a certain group of users to …


Competition Policy And The Patent System, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jul 2013

Competition Policy And The Patent System, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters will be updated frequently. The author uses …


The Walker Process Doctrine: Infringement Lawsuits As Antitrust Violations, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Sep 2008

The Walker Process Doctrine: Infringement Lawsuits As Antitrust Violations, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust law's Walker Process doctrine permits a patent infringement defendant to show that an improperly maintained infringement action constitutes unlawful monopolization or an unlawful attempt to monopolize. The infringement defendant must show both that the lawsuit is improper, which establishes the conduct portion of the violation and generally satisfies tort law requirements, and also that the structural prerequisites for the monopolization offense are present. The doctrine also applies to non-patent infringement actions and has been applied by the Supreme Court to copyright infringement actions. Walker Process itself somewhat loosely derives from the Supreme Court's Noerr-Pennington line of cases holding that …