Software patent cases often present dozens of claims requiring tremendous effort and years of costly litigation to reach a resolution. In a provocative essay, Judge William Alsup offers an innovative case management solution inspired by western frontier justice. As Judge Alsup warned attorneys...

Motivated by and drawing upon the Patent Case Management Judicial Guide developed for U.S. district courts, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched an International Patent Case Management Judicial Guide project in 2020. This treatise, scheduled for completion in November...

In Design Patent Law’s Identity Crisis, we traced the origins of design patent law’s ornamentality/non-functionality doctrine and showed how the Federal Circuit, the nation’s de facto design patent emperor over the past four decades, has turned the doctrine on its head: it has upended the...

The U.S. International Trade Commission has emerged as one of the most salient patent enforcement venues in the United States. Its fast-track procedures – typically producing determinations within 12 to 16 months of initiation of an investigation – and potent exclusion remedy have brought...

Fuzzy patent claim boundaries undermine the functioning of the patent system by making it difficult for inventors and competitors to assess freedom to operate in many technology marketplaces, especially those relating to computer software and business methods. This commentary advocates the use...

The principal recent studies of patent reform (NAS (2004), FTC (2003), Jaffe and Lerner (2004)) contend that a uniform system of patent protection must (or should) be available for anything under the sun made by man based upon one or more of the following premises: (1) the Patent Act requires...

This chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics (A.M. Polinsky & S. Shavell (eds.)) provides a comprehensive survey of the burgeoning literature on the law and economics of intellectual property. It is organized around the two principal objectives of intellectual property law:...

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the burgeoning literature on the law and economics of intellectual property. It is organized around the two principal objectives of intellectual property law: promoting innovation and aesthetic creativity (focusing on patent, trade secret, and...