Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law December 15, 2011 In Germany last week, Apple suffered a potentially significant setback when a German patent court rejected Apple's "RAND licensing defense" and instead took a step toward allowing Motorola to ban the sale of certain, allegedly infringing, Apple products.  The loss has not attracted significant attention, [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law November 7, 2011 Over the past few weeks, Samsung and Apple have grabbed headlines internationally as each firm has filed, fought, lost, and/or won well over a dozen major patent battles with the other.  Apple seems to be the entity truly on the offensive, striking first with fast-tracked [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law August 22, 2011 Google’s Android operating system is under siege.  Oracle has a substantial patent and copyright case underway in which it alleges that Android is illegally derivative of the Sun programming language, Java.  Apple has literally dozens of patent cases underway, alleging that Samsung, HTC, and Motorola [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law June 15, 2011 For the past several weeks, an active debate in the copyright world has focused on the question of whether a tattoo drawn on a person’s face is properly considered eligible for copyright protection.  The issue came up in the context of Warner Brothers’ newly released [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law March 8, 2011 Writing in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu complained that technology markets are too often allowed to remain under the control of a single dominant firm.  The theme is drawn from his recently published book, The Master Switch: [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law December 6, 2010 The Patent Act provides that an issued patent “shall be presumed valid,” but the statute fails to specify exactly how strong that presumption should be, and it fails to specify against exactly what evidence that presumption should weigh.  The Supreme Court last week granted cert [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law November 2, 2010 Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about Michael Heller’s engaging popular-press book, The Gridlock Economy.1  The book popularizes a concept that Heller has championed in his scholarship for years: the worry that, when it comes to property rights, too many [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law August 9, 2010 Patent law intentionally and explicitly exaggerates damages.  That is, when a court decides that a valid patent has been infringed, it typically imposes a remedy, the net value of which clearly exceeds the value of any deal the parties would have made had they negotiated [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law June 16, 2010 Section 109 of the Copyright Act states that the owner of a particular copy of a copyrighted work “is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy.”  This is the “first sale” doctrine, and, [...]

Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law April 26, 2010 Copyright law’s first sale doctrine is part of our everyday experience.  College students, for example, routinely purchase textbooks or study aids, use them for a semester, and then sell them to other students who might be taking the same class the following term.  Regular consumers [...]