Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Patent Infringement As Criminal Conduct, Jacob S. Sherkow

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Criminal and civil law differ greatly in their use of the element of intent. The purposes of intent in each legal system are tailored to effectuate very different goals. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060 (2011), however, imported a criminal concept of intent--willful blindness--into the statute for patent infringement, a civil offense. This importation of a criminal law concept of intent into the patent statute is novel and calls for examination. This Article compares the purposes behind intent in criminal law with the purposes behind intent in patent law to …

A Need For Clearer Language About Patent Law, 11 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 457 (2012), Paul M. Janicke

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

This article addresses the manner by which the principles and rules of United States ("U.S.") patent law are addressed, especially those that are not controversial. We often seem driven to use labels that are misleading to external observers, making the subject seem more complex than it is. The principal misstatements addressed in this article are: (1) saying that under American Invents Act, the U.S. is moving to a first-to-file system; (2) reciting that U.S. patent law has no extraterritorial reach; (3) characterizing the term of a U.S. patent as twenty years from filing; (4) purporting in patent licenses to grant …

Patent Claim Construction As A Form Of Legal Interpretation, 12 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 40 (2012), Christian E. Mammen

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., courts have employed a textualist approach when construing patent claims. Claim construction has been held to be purely a matter of law, which leaves no room for deference when the construction is reconsidered on appellate review. But as argued in this article, patent claims are a unique type of legal text, and cannot simply be analogized to statutes or contracts, which courts and scholars occasionally attempt to do. Taking lessons from the general legal theory of interpretation, the textualist approach should only be a starting point for the …

Moderating Mayo, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s latest pronouncements on patentable subject matter in Mayo v. Prometheus have already created a firestorm of controversy. The Court found that various limitations did not add enough to the law of nature that lies at the heart of Prometheus’ medical diagnostic patents to render the claims patent eligible. Because the Supreme Court never explained what “enough” is, critics have been quick to deride Mayo and warn that it would radically limit patent eligibility in a wide-ranging number of industries. Although I agree with the ultimate result reached by the Supreme Court, I am also concerned that its …

Liability For Trademark Infringement For Internet Service Providers, Katja Weckström

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

In the wake of the millennium and the rise of the internet, legislative action was taken to shelter internet service providers (ISPs) from various forms of legal action. In the turmoil of chartering new and unregulated territory, such a safe harbor was deemed necessary to protect startup businesses. Today, these internet actors (e.g. Google, Amazon, and eBay) have grown strong and powerful. Thus, intellectual property holders have started to challenge this privilege in court. Increasingly, owners of famous marks seek liability and damages for direct and indirect trademark infringement in courts around the globe. This Article will focus on liability …

Deviated, Unsound, And Self-Retreating: A Critical Assessment Of The Princo V. Itc En Banc Decision, Richard Li-Dar Wang

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

The licensing dispute between Philips and Taiwan CD-R/RW manufacturers has been a powerful generator of new developments in the field of patent and competition, which culminated with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's Princo en banc decision in 2010. By adding new elements to the patent-misuse test, this decision confined the applicable area of the patent-misuse doctrine to the restrictions that patent owners impose on licensees, thus substantially constraining its scope and changing its landscape. After careful review of the Federal Circuit's holding and reasoning, this article finds that this decision deviating from United States Supreme …

Unlocking The Genome: The Legal Case Against Genetic Diagnostic Patents, Tiana Leia Russell

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

New, innovative genetic diagnostic methods are rapidly changing the way diseases are diagnosed, prevented, and treated. While personalized medicine remains it its early stages, its potential to improve patients’ lives cannot be overstated. As advances in biotechnology offer patients the promise of improved healthcare choices, a heated debate has arisen over the propriety of patents on genetic diagnostics, and whether anyone has the right to own the information that is encoded in a person’s genes. This paper outlines recent litigation surrounding genetic and advanced diagnostic patents and examines whether they constitute patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Part …

Emerging Scholars Series: Trade Dress Rights As Instruments Of Monopolistic Competition: Towards A Rejuvenation Of The Misappropriation Doctrine In Unfair Competition Law And A Property Theory Of Trademarks, Apostolos Chronopoulos

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

The protection of trade dress restricts the ability of competitors to compete by imitation. It may also interfere with the public’s ability to copy product features that have been disclosed in expired utility and design patents. These concerns about the anticompetitive potential of trade dress claims have prompted the Supreme Court to tighten the requirements for protecting product configurations under the Lanham Act. To be protectable, the design under consideration should have already acquired secondary meaning. Furthermore, the functionality doctrine may bar protection even though there are enough alternative product configurations at the disposal of competitors so as to market …

Websites And Intangible Asset Amortization Under 26 U.S.C. § 197: A Marriage That Bears Little Fruit, Christopher H. Bowen

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Websites are not only an important part of our electronic lives, they are an important financial and business asset in their own right. With the growth of the internet as a commercial, informational, and recreational resource, companies utilize websites as an important part of their corporate financial portfolio and structure. The increased value of websites that comes from this growth has made websites a valuable asset that companies seek to use as they would other business assets. One important consideration is how the value of websites will be treated upon sale or exchange. In other words, is the website an …

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Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

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Structural Uncertainty: Understanding The Federal Circuit's Lead Compound Analysis, Briana Barron

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Recently, the Federal Circuit and lower courts have applied a new test to assess the question of obviousness for chemical compounds. While courts have always considered the presence of some lead compound to be relevant to the question of obviousness, beginning at the turn of the millennium, the Federal Circuit began assessing obviousness in a more formulaic fashion, applying what is commonly referred to as the lead compound analysis to determine if a litigant has established a prima facie case of obviousness. This Paper describes the development of the lead compound analysis, and its application. This Paper then discusses some …

International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Reviewing The (Shrinking) Principle Of Trademark Exhaustion In The European Union (Ten Years Later), Irene Calboli

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Ten years ago, I published an article in the Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review titled “Trademark Exhaustion in the European Union: Community-Wide or International? The Saga Continues.” In that article, I described the development of the principle of trademark exhaustion in the European Union (EU) and analyzed the interplay among trademark protection, trademark territoriality, and the treatment of the parallel importation of gray market products—unauthorized genuine goods imported from foreign countries—under Article 7 of the Trademark Directive (Article 7). In this Essay, I continue to explore, ten years after my 2002 article, the development of the principle of trademark exhaustion …

Contract + Tort = Property: The Trade Secret Illusion, Matthew Edward Cavanaugh

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This article commences with an introduction to the use of Hegel’s famous dialectical method as an arithmetic analysis of law. It reviews Hegel’s assertion that the sum of property and contract is tort and crime, and then suggests a better dialectic is that contract plus tort equals property. This article then reviews the doctrines of contract, tort, and property, focusing on the plaintiff’s rights and remedies, and who can be defendants in each of the three doctrines. The article next reviews the law of one particular type of intellectual property, trade secrets, because this article uses trade secrets as a …

What Good Is Fame If You Can't Be Famous In Your Own Right?: Publicity Right Woes Of The Almost Famous, Porsche Farr

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

What exactly is the price of fame? For many Emerging Celebrities, the cost of fame is the forfeiture of significant portions of the rights of their personas. More specifically, reality television stars hoping to enter the entertainment industry and amateur athletes hoping to eventually enter into professional leagues face parallel experiences of being forced into industry standard contracts in which they must give up a significant amount of publicity rights. In giving up these rights, these Emerging Celebrities forfeit millions-of-dollars of potential income to their respective industries, which they could have generated for themselves by freely utilizing their publicity rights …

God In The Machine: Encryption Algorithms And The Abstract Exemption To Patentability, Jeremy R. Hager

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This Comment explores the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bilski v. Kappos upon the patentability of encryption schemes for digital content. While the majority of commentary concerning this anticlimactic decision has focused on the heated topic of software patents, little attention has been paid to the analogous field of cryptographic technology—and the patentability thereof—in light of Bilski’s “guidance.” Cryptographic technology, commonly utilized to protect digital content under the moniker Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, has been utilized by all major content-producing industries to prevent copying by consumers of various content mediums, from software to …

International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Using Intellectual Property Rights To Create Value In The Coffee Industry, Daphne Zografos Johnson

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Coffee is the single most important tropical commodity traded worldwide. It is produced in over 50 developing countries, and it is estimated that some 20 million rural families, or 125 million people, depend on growing coffee throughout the world for their livelihoods. Over the past decade, coffee producers have been facing considerable difficulties because of low and unstable coffee prices. In 2002, coffee prices collapsed to 100-year lows in real terms, leading to a world coffee crisis. Meanwhile, the coffee economy in high income countries has been moving in the opposite direction, and the crisis is hardly visible from Starbucks-type …

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Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

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International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: Intellectual Property And Asian Values, Peter K. Yu, Peter K. Yu

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

From Niall Ferguson to Fareed Zakaria, commentators have paid growing attention to the rise of Asia and its implications for the West. Recent years have also seen the emergence of a growing volume of literature on intellectual property developments in Asia, in particular China and India. Few commentators, however, have explored whether Asian countries will take unified positions on international intellectual property law and policy.

Commissioned for the Inaugural International Intellectual Property Scholars Series, this article fills the void by examining intellectual property developments in relation to the decades-old 'Asian values' debate. Drawing on the region's diversity in economic and …

Open Textbooks And Provincial Government Policy: A Look At The Issues, Lisa Di Valentino

FIMS Publications

In 2012, the British Columbia government announced a plan to fund a program that will result in the creation of open access textbooks for 40 lower-year university courses — the first such program in any of the provinces. This paper will argue that Ontario should follow British Columbia’s lead and invest in the development of a project to create and promote the use of open textbooks. The introduction will discuss the concept of open textbooks and the various initiatives and legislation that have been introduced in the United States, and British Columbia’s plan will be described in more detail. The …

What If The Big Bad Wolf In All Those Fairy Tales Was Just Misunderstood?: Techniques For Maintaining Narrative Rationality While Altering Stock Stories That Are Harmful To Your Client’S Case, Jennifer Sheppard

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Cognitive researches have established that humans think in terms of stories and, consequently, are persuaded by stories. That means that lawyers must be wary of stock stories that effect how an audience views a given set of circumstances. When a stock story is so pervasive that it will not allow a lawyer to ignore it or a more favorable alternative story does not exist, a lawyer can present the client's story from an alternative perspective that will not evoke the embedded knowledge structures triggered by the unfavorable stock story. The lawyer can accomplish this by tinkering with the different threads …