Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

An Inside History Of The Burger Court's Patent Eligibility Jurisprudence, Christopher B. Seaman, Sheena X. Wang

Akron Law Review

Patent eligibility is one of the most important and controversial issues in intellectual property law. Although the relevant constitutional and statutory text is extremely broad, the Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the scope of patentable eligibility by creating exceptions for inventions directed to abstract ideas, laws of nature, and natural phenomenon. In particular, the Supreme Court’s decisions on this issue over the past decade have created considerable uncertainty regarding the patentability of important innovations. As a result, numerous stakeholders have called for reform of the current rules regarding patent eligibility, and members of Congress have introduced legislation to amend the …

Risk Taking And Rights Balancing In Intellectual Property Law, Clark D. Asay

Akron Law Review

Scholars have long worried that risk aversion can have significant negative effects in the marketplace. In the intellectual property law domain, some have worried that risk-averse actors can negatively influence the development of important intellectual property law doctrines, which can ultimately hamper innovation. For instance, risk-averse actors may frequently choose to obtain licenses for rights that the relevant laws do not actually require of them. When they do so, they inadvertently increase the scope of intellectual property rights because their risk-averse activities inform courts’ development of key intellectual property law doctrines.

In this Article, prepared as part of the IP …

The "Evergreening" Metaphor In Intellectual Property Scholarship, Erika Lietzan

Akron Law Review

This article is a plea for changes in the scholarly dialogue about “evergreening” by drug companies. Allegations that drug companies engage in “evergreening” are pervasive in legal scholarship, economic scholarship, medical and health policy scholarship, and policy writing, and they have prompted significant policymaking proposals. This Article was motivated by concern that the metaphor has not been fully explained and that policymaking in response might therefore be premature. It canvasses and assesses the scholarly literature—more than 300 articles—discussing or mentioning “evergreening.” It catalogues the definitions, the examples, and the empirical studies. Scholars use the term when describing certain actions taken …

Correcting Misunderstandings Of Literal Infringement Scope Regarding After-Arising Technologies Protected By The Doctrine Of Equivalents, Joshua D. Sarnoff

Akron Law Review

Based on conflicting Federal Circuit case law, many academics have written, and many practitioners likely believe, that claim meanings or their applications may expand over time for purposes of literal infringement. But this common wisdom is wrong. Under existing Federal Circuit rules, the first precedent controls in the event of a conflict over doctrine, unless and until reversed en banc. The first precedent on the issue, the 2000 Schering Corp. v. Amgen, Inc. case, held that claim scope does not reach after-arising technologies for literal infringement and suggested that if it did, then such claims would lack written description support. …

Testimony Of Joshua D. Sarnoff Senate Judiciary Committee, Ip Subcommittee June 4, 2019, Joshua D. Sarnoff

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Regents Of Univ. Of California V. Broad Inst., Inc., 903 F.3d 1286 (Fed. Cir. 2018), Ali Albazzaz

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

A Note On Mayo Foundation For Medical Education And Research V. Iancu, Florence Montarmani

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

What's Going On With Copyright Trolls?, Edward Grahovec

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of The Hear Act: Empowering American Courts To Return Holocaust-Era Artwork And Honor History, Jennifer A. Kreder, Virginia L. Schell

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Labour Of Love: An Open Access Manifesto For Freedom, Integrity, And Creativity In The Humanities And Interpretive Social Sciences, Andrea E. Pia, Simon Batterbury, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Marcel Laflamme, Gerda Wielander, Filippo M. Zerilli, Melissa Nolas, Jon Schubert, Nicholas Loubere, Ivan Franceschini, Casey Walsh, Agathe Mora, Christos Varvantakis

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Over the next decade, Open Access (OA) is likely to become the default in scholarly publishing. Yet, as commercial publishers develop new models for capturing revenue (and as policy initiatives like Plan S remain reluctant to challenge their centrality), researchers, librarians, and other concerned observers are beginning to articulate a set of values that critically engages the industry-driven project of broadening access to specialist scholarship. While alternative genealogies exist, conversations about OA in the Global North have largely been concerned with the model of the STEM disciplines, lately shifting to focus on the development of infrastructural fixes that transcend traditional …

Yard: A Tool For Curating Research Outputs, Limor Peer, Joshua Dull

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Repositories increasingly accept research outputs and associated artifacts that underlie reported findings, leading to potential changes in the demand for data curation and repository services. This paper describes a curation tool that responds to this challenge by economizing and optimizing curation efforts. The curation tool is implemented at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) as YARD. By standardizing the curation workflow, YARD helps create high quality data packages that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and promotes research transparency by connecting the activities of researchers, curators, and publishers through a single pipeline.

Mod Money, Mod Problems: A Critique Of Copyright Restrictions On Video Game Modifications And An Evaluation Of Associated Monetization Regimes, Carl "Ott" Lindstrom

William & Mary Business Law Review

Video game modifications (mods) have had a tremendously positive impact on the game industry, both in terms of commercial success and evolution of the medium. But the present court doctrine, enabled by Micro Star v. Formgen and abetted by restrictive End User License Agreements, greatly underserves the mod community and undermines the principal tenet of copyright law: the fundamental right to reap the benefits of what one has created. This Note examines and critiques the current doctrine and its ethical pitfalls. It also explores the pros and cons of current methods of mod monetization, including remakes, developer partnerships, and donation …

Open Access Uptake By Universities Worldwide, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. Van Leeuwen

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices. This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions. This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and …

Cybersecurity-Corporate Espionage, Amy J. Ramson

Open Educational Resources

The goals of this team activity in the area of criminal law, cybersecurity and cyber crime are to facilitate team work, critical thinking and presentation skills. Students will be grouped into two teams. As a team, they will analyze cases about corporate espionage committed by nation states and industry competitors through the questions presented in the activity. They will present their analysis to the class.

United States Patent And Trademark Office V. Booking.Com B.V.: How Do We Know When Something Is A Name?, Laura A. Heymann

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Going “All In” After Murphy V. Ncaa: An Approach For California To Legalize Sports Gambling, Kailey J. Walsh

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

When people think of sports gambling, they think of Las Vegas. Until recently, Nevada was the only state where one could legally place bets on sporting events. However, since the recent Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. NCAA, states are now in control when it comes to deciding whether or not to legalize sports gambling. As a result of the Murphy v. NCAA decision, some states have started to pass legislation to allow its citizens to legally place bets on certain sporting events. The driving force to legalize sports gambling stems from states’ desires to increase revenue through the taxation of …

Leveraging The Ilo For Human Rights And Workers’ Rights In International Sporting Events, Dantam Le

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Sports majorly impact the world, and millions of fans from all over the globe rally together with pride to watch their countries compete on the world’s stage in international sporting events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup. Studies suggest that mega sporting events help host cities gain an influx of resources from the central government relative to non-host cities in the same country, and that this may be particularly important in periods of economic recession and resource scarcity. Sports play a central role in quality education for all, and sports have been found to advance public health, …

The Shield And The Sword: The Press Between The Public Interest And The Illegal Interception Of Private Communications, Andres Calderon

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Journalism is not only under the attack of fake news and post-truth politics. Its main enemy comes from within. Malpractices of journalism such as the fabrication of sources and fake stories and illegal intrusion in people’s privacy are part of the equation that leads to people’s distrust in news organization.

This article addresses two very related topics that, nevertheless, have not been sufficiently studied as part of the same phenomenon: the reporter’s privilege to protect his sources’ identity and its connection with a journalist’s involvement in the illegal hacking or interception of private communications.

After reviewing most relevant case laws …

What Role Can Regulations Play? A South African Public Law Perspective On The Potential Response Through Regulations To Constitutional Reservations About The Copyright Amendment Bill, B-13b Of 2017, Jonathan Klaaren

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This working paper addresses several issues in South African law relevant to determining whether and to what extent regulations may address genuine problems in the Copyright Amendment Bill [CAB]. Regulations are of course not yet drafted for this Bill and the Bill remains a Bill and is not yet an Act. Indeed, as discussed further below, the Bill is currently under consideration in Parliament as part of a section 79 process. In addition to its focus on the CAB, this paper identifies a set of emerging South African public law issues associated with similarly situated legislation.

After a background section …

This Is No Laughing Matter: How Should Comedians Be Able To Protect Their Jokes?, Sarah Gamblin

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This note will discuss the current state of protection for jokes and comedy. As it is now, the only protection comics have is self-help, meaning comedians take punishing thefts into their own hands. This note will dive into the reasons why the current legislature and courts refuse to recognize jokes as copyrightable. Specifically, why many believe that jokes to not meet the qualifications of being an expression, as well as the fear that protecting jokes will lead to chilled speech.

Additionally, this note shall discuss the ways jokes could be protected under the current legal scheme, including trademark and state …