Corporate officer liability doctrines under both the Patent Act and the Copyright Act diverge markedly from traditional corporate, agency, and tort law doctrines. This manuscript explores why the case law in federal patent and copyright cases differs so markedly not only from traditional legal...

In the platform age, copyright-protected contents are primarily disseminated over the internet. This model poses various challenges to the copyright regime that was mainly designed in and for the analog age. One of these challenges is related to the fair balance between the interests of...

The assertion that a 'license' is simply a 'contract not to sue' has become a commonplace in both copyright and patent law. I argue that this notion is conceptually flawed, and has become a straightjacket channeling juristic reasoning into unproductive channels. At root, a license is not a...

The intellectual property laws are becoming increasingly stressed as their largely time-worn doctrines grapple with problems posed by new technology. In this Article, Dean O'Rourke argues that this pressure has become particularly acute in patent law where policymakers have expanded protection...

Since the Federal Circuit’s 2007 In re Bilski decision and the Supreme Court’s 2008 Bilski v. Kappos decision, patent law’s subject-matter eligibility standard under 35 U.S.C. § 101 has been uncertain. This paper posits patent law's patent-ineligible abstract ideas are science concepts...

The United States has gone from a net – and frequently illegal – importer of intellectual property (IP) to the World’s biggest IP supplier in a historically short time. During the past quarter century, IP holders have teamed with government entities to support international initiatives and...

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...

The Constitution grants Congress the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts through the intellectual property clause. Scholars and the courts understand “progress” to mean an increase in the creation and dissemination of copyrighted works and patented inventions It is...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In "Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property", Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

We investigate whether patents that are jointly held by legally independent companies help sustain product-market collusion. We use a simple model of repeated interactions to show that joint patents can serve collusive purposes. Our model generates two testable predictions: when joint patents...