Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Warrantless Use Of Gps Tracking Devices: Fourth Amendment Protection Restored Through Application Of An Analytical Framework, The, David Myers

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Stephen J. Rancourt

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present its Annual Survey issue of the 2010–2011 academic year. The Journal strives to find interesting and contemporary topics that bisect technology and the law, and publish authors who provide in-depth and practical analysis of these topics to the legal community and beyond. To that end, this year’s Annual Survey is devoted exclusively to the topic of electronic discovery. In the two years since the Journal last published on this important issue, the availability of electronic information has increased exponentially, courts have continued to struggle with the 2006 Amendments to …

The History Of Intellectual Property Taxation: Promoting Innovations And Other Intellectual Property Goals, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property, Innovation, And The Future: Toward A Better Model For Educating Leaders In Intellectual Property Law, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Intellectual property sits at the center of today’s global information economy. Today, producers and users of intellectual property come from both developed and developing nations. Intellectual property matters as much to China and India as it does to Germany and the United States. This reality has driven a monumental demand for lawyers who can make and implement intellectual property law - that is to say, the new leaders in intellectual property law. Indeed, the demand for intellectual property law-trained lawyers triggered a “big bang” in the creation of advanced intellectual property law programs at American law schools. The new leaders …

International Cooperation And The Patent-Antitrust Intersection, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

Commentators have long recognized the need to coordinate questions at the patent-antitrust intersection with other policy levers available under patent law. In the international context, however, control over patent policy has been fractured and entrusted to diverse decisionmakers. Many details of patent law are tightly coordinated by international agreement, while others related to antitrust are left to national discretion. This Article evaluates the consequences of this fracture, and notes ways in which the prevailing treaty regimes (the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement) distort incentives for national policymaking. National discretion at the patent-antitrust intersection can be expected to result in …

Rules For Growth: Promoting Innovation And Growth Through Legal Reform, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Robert E. Litan, Yochai Benkler, Henry N. Butler, John Henry Clippinger, Robert Cook-Deegan, Robert D. Cooter, Aaron S. Edlin, Ronald J. Gilson, Oliver R. Goodenough, Gillian K. Hadfield, Mark A. Lemley, Frank Partnoy, George L. Priest, Larry E. Ribstein, Charles F. Sabel, Peter H. Schuck, Hal S. Scott, Robert E. Scott, Alex Stein, Victoria Stodden, John E. Tyler Iii, Alan D. Viard, Benjamin Wittes

Journal Articles

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of sustaining growth both in the short and long runs. In response to this challenge, the Kauffman Foundation convened a number of America’s leading legal scholars and social scientists during the summer of 2010 to present and discuss their ideas for changing legal rules and policies to promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth. This meeting led to the publication …

Towards Symmetry In The Law Of Branding, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Companies sometimes want to abandon an old identity and rebrand with a new one. Trademark law probably does not have much to say about rebranding in itself. But we should be careful about how we think about rebranding and other undisclosed source relationships because, if not handled properly, law’s recognition of such techniques could end up reinforcing trademark owners’ ability to deter competition and control free speech.

Looking At The Lanham Act: Images In Trademark And Advertising Law, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Words are the prototypical regulatory subjects for trademark and advertising law, despite our increasingly audiovisual economy. This word-focused baseline means that the Lanham Act often misconceives its object, resulting in confusion and incoherence. This Article explores some of the ways courts have attempted to fit images into a word-centric model, while not fully recognizing the particular ways in which images make meaning in trademark and other forms of advertising. While problems interpreting images are likely to persist, this Article suggests some ways in which courts could pay closer attention to the special features of images as compared to words.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta): An Assessment, Dalindyebo Shabalala

School of Law Faculty Publications

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (‘ACTA’) is motivated by the perceived lack of progress of multilateral enforcement of intellectual property rights. Building on the equivalent provisions in EU and US bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs), the ACTA parties sought to establish best practice international standards to which other countries could aspire or adhere. Proponents stressed the need to combat the increase in global piracy and counterfeiting, drawing on estimates of the scale of the problem, such as those from the OECD that suggested international trade in counterfeit and pirated products amounted to some $200 billion in 2005 (excluding domestically …

Drawing A Line In The Sand: Copyright Law And New Museums, Megan M. Carpenter

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Over the last twenty years, audience attendance at museums, galleries, and performing arts institutions in the United States has decreased dramatically. Major museums and galleries are considering ways to add engaging and meaningful value to the user experience with technology, from incorporating user-generated content to creating multimedia installations billed as "collaborative" works.

In 2010, the Dallas Museum of Art's Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea exhibition featured landscapes from 1850 to the present, as well as a sound installation composed by students and faculty at a local university, which played on speakers throughout the show and responded directly to the …

Is Online Copyright Enforcement Scalable?, Annemarie Bridy

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article examines P2P file sharing and the copyright enforcement problem it has created through the lens of scalability. Part I traces the evolution of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks from Napster to BitTorrent, with a focus on the relative scalability of successive architectures. Part II takes up the difficult question of the scale of P2P infringement and its harms, examining the strategic number-crunching that underlies industry data on piracy, the government's credulous acceptance of that data, and the risk of letting industry hyperbole drive copyright policy and law enforcement priorities. Part III evaluates the efficacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act …

Cut In Tiny Pieces: Ensuring That Fragmented Ownership Does Not Chill Creativity, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The market for video entertainment is growing and becoming more diverse as technology reduces barriers to entry for small, independent moviemakers and distributors and increases consumers' ability to access the media of their choice. The growing complexity of the market, however, increases transaction costs for new entrants who must obtain licenses to copyrighted music, characters, storylines, or scenes that they incorporate into their movies. The entertainment bonanza offered by new technologies may not be realized in practice because of market failure. The purposes of the Copyright and Patents Clause are frustrated because creators of new works wishing to use new …

Digital Copyright And Confuzzling Rhetoric, Peter K. Yu

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

For more than a decade, policymakers, industry representatives, consumer advocates, civil libertarians, academic commentators, and user communities have advanced a wide array of arguments for or against online file sharing and restrictive copyright standards. This Article begins by introducing two short stories to illustrate the rhetorical and analytical challenges in the digital copyright debate. It then examines eight unpersuasive arguments advanced by both sides of the debate--four from the industry and four from its opponents. The Article concludes by outlining six different strategies to help the industry develop more convincing proposals for digital copyright reform.

Edible Plagiarism: Reconsidering Recipe Copyright In The Digital Age, Meredith G. Lawrence

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Sharing recipes through food blogs is an increasingly popular activity. Bloggers publish their own recipes, claiming copyright protection, but they also publish others' recipes. Food publishers who distribute recipes online may be harmed when bloggers include the entire text of the food publisher's recipe on a blog without the publisher's knowledge or permission. The blogger's inclusion of an entire recipe often reduces site traffic to the food publisher's website, thereby damaging advertising revenues. Copyright law, as courts interpret it today, does not provide these publishers with recourse against bloggers who publish their recipes without permission.

This Note analyzes the various …

Russia & Legal Harmonization: An Historical Inquiry Into Ip Reform As Global Convergence And Resistance, Boris N. Mamlyuk

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines several waves of intellectual property (IP) regulation reform in Russia, starting with an examination into early Soviet attempts to regulate intellectual property. Historical analysis is useful to illustrate areas of theoretical convergence, divergence, and tension between state ideology, positive law, and "law in action." The relevance of these tensions for post-Soviet legal reform may appear tenuous. However, insofar as IP enforcement has emerged as one of the largest hurdles for Russia's prolonged accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), these historical precedents may help explain Russia's apparent theoretical and political disconnect from the WTO. If Russian policymakers …

Copyright And Social Movements In Late Nineteenth-Century America, Steven Wilf

Faculty Articles and Papers

The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests as a mechanism to establish claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’ ever-expanding proprietary control of knowledge and establishing a more public regarding copyright system. This Article examines one of the most notable intellectual property political movements, the emergence of late nineteenth-century agitation to provide copyright protection for foreign authors as a social movement. It places this political and legal activism within the larger framework of Progressive Era reform. During this …

Non-Per Se Treatment Of Buyer Price-Fixing In Intellectual Property Settings, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

The ability of intellectual property owners to earn monopoly rents and the inability of horizontal competitors to price fix legally are two propositions that are often taken as givens. This article challenges the wholesale adoption of either proposition within the context of buyer price-fixing in intellectual property markets. More specifically, it examines antitrust law’s role in protecting patent holders’ rents through its condemnation of otherwise ostensibly efficient buyer price fixing. Using basic economic analysis, this article refines the legal standards applicable at this point of intersection between antitrust and patent law. In particular, the author recommends the limited abandonment of …

Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …

Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Recent commentators have observed, and sometimes lamented, significant gaps between the formal reach of the patent system and the practical exclusionary effect of patent law. It is costly for technology developers to obtain and assert patents, for technology users to identify the patents they might be infringing and to clear rights, and for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to find patent-defeating prior art. The costs of the patent system provide shelter for infringing behavior that might otherwise lead to either licensing or liability, perhaps mitigating excesses in the patent system while retaining strong rights that motivated owners may enforce. …

Patenting Genes And Genetic Methods: What's At Stake?, Eileen M. Kane

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.