Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Snopa And The Ppa: Do You Know What It Means For You? If Snopa (Social Networking Online Protection Act) Or Ppa (Password Protection Act) Do Not Pass, The Snooping Could Cause You Trouble, Angela Goodrum

Journal of Public Law and Policy

This article discusses the importance of passing the Social Networking Online Protection Act and the Password Protection Act to afford vital protection against discrimination in hiring and admission decisions. Existing laws fail to adequately provide protection against discrimination after the advent of social media. Furthermore, failure to provide to provide protection via federal laws will create a disparity in the protection afforded individuals across the United States.

Social media has introduced a new world of opportunities for sharing, networking, but it has also created ample opportunities for others to snoop around, discriminate, and base their hiring or admission decisions, in …

“Sharing” Copyrights: The Copyright Implications Of User Content In Social Media, Jessica Gutierrez Alm

Journal of Public Law and Policy

Copyright law in America, in its current stage of development, does not sit well with common social media practices. This article explores the copyright implications of user content on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. It first examines the copyrightability of "user-generated" content, and the broad licenses that users grant by agreeing to the vague Terms of Use that social media sites set forth. The article then looks to "user-found" content and activities such as "sharing" or "pinning" the creative works of others. Through these practices and conflicting Terms of Use, social media websites both encourage and …

Facing Real-Time Identification In Mobile Apps & Wearable Computers, Yana Welinder

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

The use of face recognition technology in mobile apps and wearable computers challenges individuals’ ability to remain anonymous in public places. These apps can also link individuals’ offline activities to their online profiles, generating a digital paper trail of their every move. The ability to go off the radar allows for quiet reflection and daring experimentation—processes that are essential to a productive and democratic society. Given what we stand to lose, we ought to be cautious with groundbreaking technological progress. It does not mean that we have to move any slower, but we should think about potential consequences of the …

Who Is The Witness To An Internet Crime: The Confrontation Clause, Digital Forensics, And Child Pornography, Merritt Baer

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause guarantees the accused the right to confront witnesses against him. In this article I examine child pornography prosecution, in which we must apply this constitutional standard to digital forensic evidence. I ask, “Who is the witness to an Internet crime?”

The Confrontation Clause proscribes the admission of hearsay. In Ohio v. Roberts, the Supreme Court stated that the primary concern was reliability and that hearsay might be admissible if the reliability concerns were assuaged. Twenty-four years later, in Crawford v. Washington, the Supreme Court repositioned the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment as a procedural …

Here, There And Everywhere: Mobility Data In The Eu (Help Needed: Where Is Privacy?), Raffaele Zallone

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

European law on data privacy has not clearly developed the concept of mobility data. The evolution of technology has forced the EU to cope with this reality, but so far its legislation lacks a specific focus on this aspect of technology.

A body composed of representatives from the various data protection authorities, the so-called article 29 Working Party (the name stems from section 29 of the European Data Privacy Directive, that calls for the formation and the task of this body) has coped with various aspects of mobile technology, but the documents and analysis it has produced are general and …

Reining In Remedies In Patent Litigation: Three (Increasingly Immodest) Proposals, Thomas F. Cotter

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

This essay, which builds on my recent work on the law and economics of comparative patent remedies, presents three proposals relating to the enforcement of domestic patent rights. The first, which may be close to being adopted in the United States, is for the courts and the International Trade Commission (ITC) to adopt a general presumption, grounded in patent law and policy, that patent owners who have committed to license their standard essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms are not entitled to permanent injunctions or exclusion orders, but rather only to a damages in the form of …

In Territorio Veritas? Bringing Geographical Coherence Into The Ambiguous Definition Of Geographical Indications Of Origin, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I touch upon a topic that remains highly controversial in international intellectual property law—the legal protection of geographical indications of origin (GIs): Chianti wine, Champagne sparkling wine, Gorgonzola cheese, Parma ham, Darjeeling tea, Colombian coffee, and other terms that indicate (or are supposed to indicate, as I will develop in this article) the geographical origin of the products they identify. In line with the theme of this special issue of the WIPO Journal, I focus on the requirement of “geographical origin” upon which the protection of GIs has been historically built and is generally justified. In particular, …

Contracting In The Dark: Casting Light On The Shadows Of Second Level Agreements, Abigail R. Simon

William & Mary Business Law Review

In the early days of the Internet, copyright owners concentrated on eliminating infringement threats posed by the new technology. Today, many copyright owners are partnering with major user-generated content platforms in order to participate in and receive compensation for some third-party infringement occurring on the Internet. YouTube pioneered such partnership arrangements in 2006 with a new kind of copyright license now referred to as a “second level agreement.” In 2008, YouTube unveiled Content ID, which streamlined the process for entering into second level agreements with the site. This Note analyzes Content ID and the second level agreements underlying it to …

Trademark Owner's Strategy: Litigation Versus The Udrp, Jessica Sganga

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

The article offers information on the enactment, development, and significance of the Lanham Act, the Federal Trademark Diluting Act (FTDA), the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), and the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to address the challenges arising out of the domain name registration process in the U.S. It informs that these acts provides assistance in safeguarding the rights of trademark owners against the domain name registrants.

Copyright Update 2014, Margaret Ann Wilkinson

Law Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Standard For Awarding Attorney Fees Under 35 U.S.C. Section 285 To Prevailing Parties In Patent Litigation - Octane Fitness, Llc V. Icon Health & Fitness, Inc. And Highmark, Inc. V. Allcare Health Management Systems, Dennis D. Crouch, Jafon Fearson

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in two patent infringement cases that both concern shifting of attorney fees under the “exceptional case” standard of 35 U.S.C. § 285. The Federal Circuit has traditionally been resistant to fee shifting awards—especially in cases where an accused infringer is the prevailing party. In Octane Fitness, petitioner asks the Court to lower the standard for proving an exceptional case. In Highmark, petitioner asks for deference to lower court exceptional case findings.

Governing Data And Ai To Protect Inner Freedoms Includes A Role For Ip, Giuseppina D'Agostino, Robert Fay

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

Generative AI has taken the world by storm — and caught regulators everywhere by surprise. In a matter of months, technology once confined to a specialized domain has now permeated the daily lives of ordinary users and become interwoven with our routines and activities. Yet there are no coherent guardrails in place, no user-friendly manuals and no standards or regulations, neither national nor global. The ungoverned and growing ubiquity of generative AI is similar to, and just as troubling as, that of the large digital platforms that play an important role in the work and personal lives of countless individuals …

Making Patents Useful, Sean B. Seymore

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is axiomatic in patent law that an invention must be useful. The utility requirement has been a part of the statutory scheme since the Patent Act of 1790. But what does it mean to be useful? The abstract and imprecise nature of the term combined with the lack of objective criteria for assessing it make utility the most malleable patentability requirement. As the invention landscape has evolved over time, the Patent Office and the courts have exploited this malleability to create technologically specific utility standards — de minimis for some inventions, but considerably more stringent for others. This has …

An Empirical Study Of The Use Of Legal Scholarship In Supreme Court Trademark Jurisprudence, Derek Simpson, Lee Petherbridge

Cardozo Law Review

Although the usefulness of law review and law journal articles to the decisional lawmaking process is a topic that has captured the imagination of jurists, reporters, and legal academics like few others, very little is actually known about how and why courts use such legal scholarship. This Article addresses that lack of knowledge. It reports an empirical study of the Supreme Court's use of legal scholarship in its trademark jurisprudence that spans the years 1949-2011. Among its contributions are: (1) the identification of Supreme Court trademark cases using and not using legal scholarship, including the identification of the pieces of …

Negotiating The Unknown: A Compulsory Licensing Solution To The Orphan Works Problem, Robert Kirk Walker

Cardozo Law Review

The artistic heritage of the United States is rotting away in "the bowels of a few great libraries," providing value to no one. If the owner of a work's copyrights is unknown or cannot be located, then the work cannot be licensed for use in new creative projects or preserved in a digital form, and is often unavailable to the public. To combat this "orphan works" problem, the Copyright Office has proposed a statutory limitation on infringement liability for users of orphan works who have completed a "reasonably diligent" search for the work's owner. However, this limited liability approach provides …

The United States Supreme Court’S Decision In Kirtsaeng V. Wiley & Sons: An “Inevitable” Step In Which Direction?, Irene Calboli

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This opinion analyzes the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons. In this decision, the Court ruled that the principle of copyright exhaustion as provided in Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act equally applies to products “lawfully made” in the United States as well as to products that have been “lawfully made” in foreign countries. This “revolutionary” decision came after almost two decades of conflicting positions, including two previous Supreme Court decisions that had failed to clarify the issue, notably Quality King v. L’anza and Costco v. Omega. Yet, a …

Rehabilitating The Property Theory Of Copyright's First Amendment Exemption, Tun-Jen Chiang

Notre Dame Law Review

A continuing controversy in copyright law is the exemption of copyright from First Amendment scrutiny. The Supreme Court has justified the exemption based on history and the intentions of the Framers, but this explanation is unpersuasive on the historical facts.

There is an alternative explanation: copyright is property, and private property is generally exempt from scrutiny under standard First Amendment doctrine. Many scholars have noted this theory, but they have been harshly dismissive towards it. For example, Mark Lemley and Eugene Volokh view the property theory as so clearly wrong as to be a “non sequitur,” because it supposedly implies …

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 …

Modding: Amateur Authorship And How The Video Game Industry Is Actually Getting It Right, Ryan Wallace

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Betty Boop And The Return Of Aesthetic Functionality: A Bitter Medicine Against "Mutant Copyrights"?, Irene Calboli

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a brief overview of the history and developments of the doctrine of aesthetic functionality in the United States and examines the recent decisions in Fleischer Studios, Inc v AVELA, Inc . In particular, the article argues that the courts in Fleischer added an important element to the interpretation of the doctrine, namely the fact that the courts seemed willing to resort to aesthetic functionality to counter the consequences resulting from the practice of using trade mark law as an additional form of protection for copyrighted, or once copyrighted, creative works.