As commonly understood, the U.S. patent system is a utilitarian regime that employs exclusive rights and market incentives to promote technological progress. Unlike international and foreign regimes, the domestic patent system less explicitly addresses non-utilitarian issues such as access,...

Technologies such as social media, autonomous vehicles, and “big data” analytics generate enormous benefits for society, but they also create substantial harms. Many of these effects take the form of externalities—external benefits and harms that a decisionmaker (such as an inventor)...

How should property rights be allocated when one party, without authorization, substantially improves the property of another? According to the doctrine of accession, a good-faith improver may take title to such improved property, subject to compensating the original owner for the value of the...

Patents on biomedical research tools - technological inputs to experimentation - may inhibit scientific inquiry and the development of life-enhancing therapies. Various "public law" approaches to address this challenge, such as a common law experimental use exception to patent infringement, have...

Design patents have recently burst onto the intellectual property stage, but they are surprisingly underdeveloped for a body of law that is more than a century and a half old. Design patents are, quite simply, a body of law without design: there is little coherent theoretical underpinning for...

This Note applies the concept of "paradigm shifts" from the history and philosophy of science to describe how patents on biomedical research tools - inputs to basic research - can create conditions conducive to fundamental advances in scientific theory. Patents on research tools can prevent...

As a key driver of innovation and economic growth, university-industry technology transfer has attracted significant attention. Formal technology transfer, which encompasses patenting and licensing university inventions, is often characterized as proceeding according to market principles....

While COVID-19 vaccines have saved countless lives, their highly unequal distribution around the world has generated significant concern. Biopharmaceutical firms hold patents on these vaccines, and critics have argued for weakening these patents to increase access to these essential resources....

This Article is based on the 2021 Shidler Lecture, which was delivered at the University of Washington School of Law on November 4, 2021. Through enormous public support and private initiative, biopharmaceutical firms have developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time. These...