Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Mandating Fluoride: A Constitutional Exercise Of Police Power, Anita Jahangiri

Seattle University Law Review

This Note addresses the ongoing debate over fluoridation: the regulation of fluoride levels in public water systems. Extensive research indicates fluoridation, when regulated at the recommended concentration, is both safe and highly effective in preventing dental caries. Better known as cavities, dental caries is a preventable yet widespread health issue that disproportionately affects low-income populations. Reducing dental health disparities among economic classes is a pressing public health issue. Fluoridation is not merely a policy option, but a critical, proven tool to address such disparities and uphold the collective welfare of Washingtonians. This Note focuses on fluoridation as a public health …

Neurodiversity In The Courtroom: Expanding Jury Service Accessibility Beyond Physical Disability, Samantha L. Mabe

Seattle University Law Review

The Americans with Disabilities Act has required equal access to jury service for decades; however, efforts to accommodate jurors with disabilities have been slow to develop beyond some minor accommodations for physical disabilities. While neurodivergent people frequently struggle to navigate a world catered toward neurotypical people, jury service remains inaccessible for many neurodivergent people who need accommodations to attend trial and engage in jury deliberations. If courts and advocates do not consider how to develop accommodations to secure the service of neurodivergent jurors, they will miss out on the unique skillsets that neurodivergent people can bring to resolving disputes.

Disabled …

The Life Of A Copyright, Annabel Haddock

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

On August 23rd, 2021, stand-up comedian Caroline Timoney posted a TikTok video where she stated, “I fear I may have girl bossed a little too close to the sun.” The video went viral and, to this day, it is her most viewed post on the platform, with upwards of seven and a half million views as of October 13, 2025, and over twenty-four thousand videos reposted using her audio. Taylor Swift’s twelfth and most recent album, The Life of a Showgirl, was released on October 3rd, 2025, and includes a song titled “CANCELLED!” featuring the lyric “Did you girlboss …

An Out-Of-The-Block Solution For Modern Ip Law: How Pairing Generative Ai With Blockchain Could Resolve Copyright Conflicts, Emma Wozniak

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Bets To Threats: The Impact Of Murphy On Student-Athletes, Rachel Bender

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

The United States is experiencing a surge in the sports betting market following the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to open the door for legalization. College sports, a beloved tradition for decades, has only become more popular with the rise of social media, which allows fans to interact with the athletes directly without ever leaving their homes. Due to this accessibility and popularity, it is easy to see why sports betting and collegiate sports would go hand in hand. With the legalization of sports betting, fans are no longer just viewers of the game; they are investors. Fans can place proposition …

Dream A Little Dream Of Licensing: Jazz And The § 115 Compulsory Music Reproduction License, Jackson S. Roberg

Northwestern University Law Review

The compulsory music reproduction license codified at 17 U.S.C. § 115 allows anyone to obtain the right to record another version of, or “cover,” a previously published musical work. Invoking the compulsory license, however, comes at a dramatic cost. Under § 115(a)(2), the licensee cannot copyright any original musical material they compose for the cover without express permission from the underlying copyright owner, even if that material would otherwise be copyrightable. This limitation gravely harms jazz music, as jazz relies on dynamic recompositions of preexisting music. Jazz musicians depend on compulsory licenses to record the reinterpretative covers essential to the …

Emotionally Unstable: Addressing Emotional Distress As A Concrete Injury In Data Breach Cases Post-Transunion, Anna P. Cox

Fordham Law Review

Data breaches and data breach litigation are exponentially on the rise. Plaintiffs whose information is stolen in a data breach often claim emotional distress for fear of future harm the data breach may cause. However, plaintiffs who bring suit in federal court must show that they have suffered an injury in fact for purposes of Article III standing before a federal court will exercise jurisdiction. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez requires that plaintiffs who seek money damages under a theory of risk of future harm show that they have suffered a present concrete injury to …

When The Screen Lies: Navigating Privacy And Publicity In An Ai World, Nancy M. Menagh

Fordham Law Review

A key issue of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike was the use of generative AI in the entertainment industry and, more specifically, the creation of uncanny digital replicas of performers being used without their knowledge or consent. Since then, concerns have only intensified around the unauthorized creation and use of digital replicas and the ease with which they can be made and disseminated online. Currently, there is a patchwork of state laws that attempt to target these issues, but they have proven ineffective against the challenges presented by digital replicas.

This Note analyzes the problems digital replicas have raised in the …

Reclaiming Sound: Copyright Restoration As Cultural And Economic Justice For Black Musicians, James Roberts Jr.

Senior Theses

This paper examines copyright restoration as both a legal mechanism and a form of cultural reparations for Black musicians historically excluded from ownership and profit in the American music industry. It traces the evolution of U.S. copyright law from its earliest forms to the Music Modernization Act of 2018, highlighting how shifting statutory frameworks have gradually extended protection and restoration rights to artists who were once denied them. The analysis situates this legal trajectory within a broader history of racialized exploitation in the recording industry, where inequitable contracts and systemic power imbalances functioned as modern forms of artistic sharecropping. Through …

Ip @ The U - September 2025, Jorge L. Contreras

Law School Historical Documents

Welcome to IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. This issue covers highlights from Summer and Early Fall 2025.

United States Response To 2025 Questionnaire, Philippa Loengard

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

ALAI-USA is the U.S. branch of ALAI (Association Littèraire et Artistique Internationale). ALAI-USA was started in the 1980's by the late Professor Melville B. Nimmer, and was later expanded by Professor John M. Kernochan.

Venturing Into Health, Rachel E. Sachs

Fordham Law Review

In recent years, the landscape of venture capital (VC) investment in healthcare technologies has been altered by the introduction of new types of VC firms: those that have emerged from hospital systems and health insurers. However, the legal literature has not yet analyzed these new VC firms, the role they may play in healthcare innovation, and how innovation law and policy ought to consider their involvement. Hospital system and health insurer VC firms operate very differently than traditional VC firms, even those that have historically developed healthcare specializations. Instead of simply investing capital into start-up firms, hospital system and health …

Double Dosing: How Brand-Name Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Manipulate Patent Rules To Extend Market Exclusivity, Elizabeth Hertzberg

Washington and Lee Law Review

A robust patent system is important for spurring innovation, but it is not without risk. Because a patent owner has exclusivity over the patented subject matter for a specific term, there is incentive to extend that monopoly however possible. Identical subject matter is unpatentable, but obvious variants of an existing patent may be allowed if the applicant agrees to the same expiration date for both patents. This agreement is called a terminal disclaimer. While patents tied together with terminal disclaimers may not necessarily lead to unjust patent term extensions, an army of terminal disclaimers directed at one invention presents a …

Fairer Public Benefit In Copyright Law, Amanda Levendowski Tepski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1966, a court considered expressly whether a secondary use of copyrighted works served a public benefit. While public benefit has become a subfactor of the fair use doctrine, it remains undefined, uncodified, and undertheorized. Courts often invoked public benefit in pivotal cases involving novel technologies, from home video recorders to digital libraries to algorithms--but they did not need to. After the recent Supreme Court decision in Google v. Oracle, however, public benefit is unavoidable: The Court stated that “we must take into account the public benefits the copying will likely produce.” A qualitative analysis of key public benefit cases …

Digital Regulation And Development: A Global Micro And Macro Comparison, Katrin Kuhlmann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Regulation of the digital economy is receiving increased attention both domestically and internationally, but too little scholarship exists assessing the degree to which these new rules effectively support economic, social, and sustainable development. This Article advances a micro-macro framework for assessing digital regulation and its development dimension, including digital inclusion and measures to address the digital divide, the protection of human rights, and the operationalization of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In doing so, it incorporates a “micro international law” methodology to compare domestic legal design features and trace their diffusion into regional trade agreements and, in turn, into …

Pleasure & Pain In Intellectual Property, Andrew Gilden

William & Mary Law Review

Intellectual property produces pleasure. IP laws incentivize investment in popular culture, helping to ensure the viability of entertainment industries and the steady production of our favorite shows, cherished brands, and beloved celebrities. Across IP-heavy industries, creators cite the joy of writing, composing, coding, and experimenting as a motivation for countless hours in the office, studio, or lab. Nonetheless, in a broad range of settings, and across several areas of IP, courts have responded with hostility to personal accounts of pleasure in IP disputes. When a defendant admits to using IP because they are fans of the plaintiff, or because they …

Is Your Data Good, Bad, Or Neutral?: Redefining Concreteness For Data Breach Harms, Jeeyoon Lim

Fordham Law Review

In recent years, the Supreme Court has tightened federal court standing requirements for intangible harms, including statutory harms. In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the Court held that a mere statutory violation, absent a common-law analogue, is not sufficiently concrete to grant standing. The Court did not provide clear guidance as to how stringent the common-law analogue analysis must be, other than that it does not require an “exact duplicate.” Because of the ever-evolving nature of digital data, data breach victims attempting to enforce their statutory right to privacy in federal court have struggled to rely on tradition and history …

Common Law Notice-And-Takedown, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

Platform liability is a complex landscape under U.S. law. The immunity for users’ torts provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has understandably garnered the most attention. In addition, many intellectual property law scholars have also examined the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), which provides safe harbors for users’ copyright infringements. The DMCA enumerates a long series of requirements that online platforms must satisfy to be immunized for their users’ infringements, including a notice-and-takedown regime, a repeat infringer policy, and a prohibition on having the right and ability to control and a direct financial benefit. …

Attribution As Architecture In The Digital Age, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

As technology changes, one thing remains constant: human creators seem to care about attribution, whether as creators or as audience members. Current U.S. law lacks the means for many creators to effectively address attributional interests, and experience has shown that top-down, imposed technological solutions can fail to gain the necessary buy-in and adoption. The best approach, examples suggest, is for platforms to think of attribution as part of the architecture of their systems, but to take their cues from user-developed, individualized solutions, which will not only be more responsive to user interests but also allow adaptation as interests change and …

Dignity And Deepfakes, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

Today, we face a dangerous technosocial combination: AI-generated deepfakes and the Internet. Believable and accessible, these deepfakes have already spread sex, lies, and false advertisements across the Internet and targeted everyone from Taylor Swift to middle school students. Dissemination of deepfakes inflicts multifarious dignitary harms against their victims—especially women and LGBTQ+ persons—stripping them of control over their own identities, harming their reputations, and ostracizing them from society through shame.

Yet this is not the first time a new technology for capturing one’s likeness and a method for disseminating images threatened individuals’ dignity. In the late nineteenth century, the right of …