Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law February 6, 2012 A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the RAND commitment, explaining how technology firms often license patents not by explicitly agreeing as to price, but instead by more vaguely agreeing to license their patents on “reasonable” and “non-discriminatory” terms.  As I explained in [...]

Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University January 30, 2012 In Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association v. Gannett Co., Inc.,1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected a claim by Gannett that its newspapers had a First Amendment right to broadcast high school athletic games, despite an exclusive licensing agreement that had licensed broadcast [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law January 23, 2012 This column1 follows on the entry of Aug. 29, 2011, which addressed the international copyright law status of works first disclosed in digital format over the Internet, and not subsequently “published” in hardcopy formats.  The prior column concluded that under the definition of [...]

Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law January 10, 2012 In the previous entry in this series, I discussed the narrow foundations of trademark law and its more recent expansion – in particular, how new approaches to trademark liability have departed from the law’s traditional focus on disputes about the source of competing [...]

Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law January 6, 2012 In this Intellectual Property Viewpoints series, we tend to focus on copyright and patent law – the “big two” IP regimes that govern innovation in the arts and sciences.  But there is a third IP regime, a cousin to copyright and patent, which [...]

Professor Robert P. Merges University of California at Berkeley School of Law January 4, 2012   1.  Introduction Now that In re Bilski has been decided, there is an enormous amount of speculation about the impact on patent applicants, litigants, and other participants in the patent system.  Most of the commentary is concerned with the [...]

Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School December 23, 2011 Possible copyright legislation has been in the news with the House Judiciary Committee’s on-again, off-again mark up of H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act.”  SOPA, and its Senate cousin, the PROTECT IP Act, are designed to limit intellectual property infringement at [...]

Professor Peter S. Menell Herman Phleger Visiting Professor of Law (2011-12), Stanford Law School Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law and Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology University of California at Berkeley School of Law December 21, 2011 As fans of the 1970s television hit “Happy Days” will recall, the final curtain became inevitable [...]

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. Justin Hughes, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University December 13, 2011 One of the troubling things about intellectual property discourse – whether policy discussions in Washington or law review articles on Westlaw – is that arguments (particularly the ones that get repeated over and over) often do not get the kind of scrutiny, analysis, [...]