Volume 18, Issue 3 PATENTS AND SMALL PARTICIPANTS IN THE SMARTPHONE INDUSTRY ......................................................... 375 ... Read more about Volume 18, Issue 3
If someone were to tell you that fax machines, remote printers, and even email were all patented as far back as 1840—and by a single inventor—you probably would not believe it. Indeed, you would be in good company; the Supreme Court essentially agreed with that sentiment in a landmark decision in 1853.1 Samuel Morse, best remembered for inventing the telegraph, proved that even great inventors are susceptible to claiming inventions that far exceed their actual contributions to the knowledge pool.... Read more about FUNCTIONAL CLAIMING AND THE PATENT BALANCE
Ever since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began issuing utility patents for plants, the United States has sat squarely on the frontlines of what have come to be known as the “seed wars.” In the last two decades, the majority of battles in the U.S. seed wars have been waged in the form of patent infringement lawsuits.... Read more about WEEDS, SEEDS & DEEDS REDUX: NATURAL AND LEGAL EVOLUTION IN THE U.S. SEED WARS
Concern about free-riding drives intellectual property law, especially its misappropriation doctrine. Freely enjoying goods that are costly to produce may be bad for society as a whole (because it weakens private incentives to create such goods) and also unfair to those who have created them (because they are not compensated for all the value they produced).... Read more about MISAPPROPRIATION AND THE MORALITY OF FREE-RIDING
Copyright law undergoes a criminalization process. Since the birth of criminal copyright in the 19th century, there has been a substantial increase in criminal copyright legislation. Copyright criminalization could lead to a paradigm shift toward a criminal-oriented law. However, legislation alone is insufficient to change the perception of copyright to a criminal-oriented law, as italso depends on practice.... Read more about THE CRIMINAL COPYRIGHT GAP
Defenders of strong intellectual property rights often maintain thatintellectual property infringement is theft and that the sanctions associated with it ought to be high. Others are skeptical of the property comparison and think that much lower sanctions are appropriate. In this Article, we argue that a careful analysis demonstrates: 1) that intellectual property infringement can be analogized to a property crime, but 2) that the more analogous crime is vandalism or trespass rather than theft.... Read more about INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY INFRINGEMENT AS VANDALISM
Copyright was initially conceptualized as a means to free creative parties from dependency on public and private patrons such as monarchs, churches, and well-to-do private citizens. By achieving independence for creative parties, the theory ran, copyright led to greater production of a more diverse set of creative works.... Read more about COPYRIGHT’S TECHNOLOGICAL INTERDEPENDENCIES
Bessen and Meurer theorize that a breakdown in notice of patent boundaries caused the patent litigation surge of the 1990s. They argue that a prime source of this breakdown was the proliferation of software patents with particularly uncertain scope. In this Article I seek evidence that software patent scope is more uncertain by extending the empirical literature on claim construction reversal... Read more about "Fuzzy" Software Patent Boundaries and High Claim Construction Reversal Rates
Patent trolls—also known variously as non-practicing entities, patent assertion entities, and patent monetizers—are a top priority on legislative and regulatory reform agendas. In modern debates, however, the biopharmaceutical industry goes conspicuously unmentioned. Although the biopharmaceuticalindustry is paradigmatically centered on patents, conventional wisdom holds that it is largely unthreatened by trolls. This Article shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong, both theoretically and descriptively.... Read more about Patent Trolling: Why Bio & Pharmaceuticals Are At Risk
Existing copyright policy is based largely on the utilitarian theory of incentivizing creative works. This Article looks at content production incentives in the online adult entertainment industry. A recent trend of industry-specific studies tries to better understand the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and creation incentives in practice. This Article makes a contribution to the literature by analyzing a major entertainment content industry where copyright protection has been considerably weakened in recent years.... Read more about IP Without IP? A Study of the Online Adult Entertainment Industry