Intellectual Property
Government Research
Previous scholarship has analyzed a host of innovation institutions—including patents, prizes, and grants—but has overlooked government-conducted R&D. This Article offers the first comprehensive analysis of government research, examining its institutional design, comparative advantages, and normative justifications, and situating it as an indispensable paradigm within the national innovation system.
Pointless IP
This Essay examines the rise of originalism and textualism within the Supreme Court’s intellectual-property jurisprudence. Due to its intense dynamism, intellectual-property law exposes the failures of these methods, which detach law from social reality and human goals, and highlights the need for an alternative jurisprudence of purpose.
Does Pharma Need Patents?
This Feature revisits the widely held assumption that pharma needs patents to sustain innovation. By analyzing the information goods underlying drugs, this Feature demonstrates that innovation in this sector can proceed without patents. Replacing patents with a tailored form of regulatory exclusivity would reap large gains in social welfare.
The Antibody Patent Paradox
Shifts in patent law’s enablement and written description requirements make it impractical for patentees of antibody technologies to disclose and claim their inventions. We describe this as a doctrinal paradox and offer a solution that gives patentees the power to claim antibodies without giving them unlimited control over a market.
Rulemaking § 101
This Note chronicles the Patent Office’s use of guidance to reduce the judicially created uncertainty that surrounds patentable subject matter. It argues that these guidance documents closely resemble legislative rulemaking and thus push the boundaries of the Office’s current authority.
The Law of Informational Capitalism
Informational capitalism brings new dangers of surveillance and manipulation—but also of accelerating monopoly, inequality, and democratic disempowerment. Examining two important new books on the topic, this Review maps the law and political economy of informational capitalism, a domain of rising private power, to enable us better to confront it.
Innovation Policy Pluralism
Intellectual property is not a monolith. It rewards innovators with temporary exclusive rights to their creations, and it conditions consumers’ access to such goods through proprietary pricing. Using this insight, this Article develops a more accurate framework for analyzing the innovation policy landscape than any in the existing literature.
When Patents are Sovereigns: The Competitive Harms of Leasing Tribal Immunity
The Hatch-Waxman Act and the AIA balance exclusive rights of pharmaceutical patent holders with entry of generic competitors. Allergan’s recent patent transfer to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe threatens this balance. This Essay proposes antitrust suits to sidestep sovereign immunity and prevent companies from unduly increasing their patents’ probabilistic value.
Vaccine Licensure in the Public Interest: Lessons from the Development of the U.S. Army Zika Vaccine
This Essay analyzes the recent attempted exclusive licensing deal for a Zika vaccine, which would have hampered the drug’s affordability and availability. Revising the Patent Act to increase transparency and accountability in the licensing process would ultimately result in more affordable vaccines for outbreak diseases like Zika.
What’s Wrong with Intentionalism? Transformative Use, Copyright Law, and Authorship
A Trademark Defense of the Disparagement Bar
The Supreme Court will soon hear argument over whetherCongress may forbid registering trademarks that consist of “matter which may disparage or falsely suggest aconnection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or nationalsymbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” The disparagement bar is thebasis for the 2014 ruling by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) thatordered the cancellation of trademark registrations belonging to the WashingtonNFL team because the term “redskin” disparages Native Americans. Late last year, however, theFederal Circuit ruled en banc that the disparagement bar is unconstitutional onFirst Amendment grounds in In re Tam.
Toward an Efficient Licensing and Rate-Setting Regime: Reconstructing § 114(i) of the Copyright Act
Garcia v. Google and a "Related Rights" Alternative to Copyright in Acting Performances
The Continuum of Excludability and the Limits of Patents
122 Yale L.J. 1900 (2013). In IP scholarship, patents are commonly understood as more efficient than other approaches to innovation policy. Their primary ostensible advantage is allocative: as a form of property rights, patents act as a conduit between market signals and potential innovators, ostensibly guiding investment toward inventions with the most social value. Existing accounts recognize that, in practice, signals of social value that patents facilitate may be attenuated because of, for example, transaction costs and limits on the scope and length of patent rights. We show here, however, a different problem with the conventional allocative account. The appropriability mechanism patents rely on, namely excludability, operates in asymmetrical ways for different kinds of information goods. While scholars have noted that patent systems fail to create goods whose value is difficult to appropriate in consumer markets, this fact has not been fully appreciated in the literature, nor have its implications for the standard justification for patents. Through detailed examples in the health context we show that some kinds of information goods will be much more difficult to exclude than others. Importantly, there is no reason to expect that the ease of exclusion will be correlated with social value. The analytic point that emerges is generalizable: patents themselves can have distortive effects, stemming from structural features of exclusion rights. Unlike the problem of attenuation, the problem of asymmetric nonexcludability cannot be resolved by increasing patent scope or length. Because excludability is variable along a continuum, property rights in information, even if formally perfected, and even assuming away conventional transaction costs, will create asymmetrical demand for different kinds of information goods. This argument provides an important new justification for alternatives to patents such as government funding and gives us new insights about how to allocate such funding. It also reinforces the need for a comparative institutional approach to innovation policy, and for incorporating into our debates currently unrecognized implications that patents may have for values such as privacy and free speech.
Copyright Protection in an Opt-Out World: Implied License Doctrine and News Aggregators
122 Yale L.J. 837 (2012).
The Artist as Brand: Toward a Trademark Conception of Moral Rights
122 Yale L.J. 218 (2012). The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) controversially recognized artists’ “moral rights” by protecting their work from alteration or destruction and by preventing the use of an artist’s name on a work he did not create. While moral rights are frequently criticized as antithetical to the traditional economic framework of American intellectual property law, Henry Hansmann and Marina Santilli have suggested that moral rights can be justified economically because they vindicate artists’ pecuniary interests. This Note, in contrast, argues that VARA also benefits the purchasing and viewing public, especially in an era of factory-made or assistant-produced art works. Specifically, moral rights, like trademark law, can reduce search costs, ensure truthful source identification, and increase efficiency in the art market. This comparison between trademark law and moral rights shows that the sort of rights regime established by VARA is neither unique nor unprecedented in American law, and that it is highly economic in character. Thus, this Note hopes to reframe the dialogue surrounding moral rights, shifting it away from the classic “personhood” or “anti-commodification” arguments that have undergirded the rhetoric up to this day.