Courts are rarely asked to judge beauty. Such a subjective practice would normally be anathema to the ideal of objective legal standards. However, one area of federal law has a long tradition of explicitly requiring courts to make aesthetic decisions: the law of design. New designs may be...

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...

Innovation is an inherently uncertain process. Success is typically coupled with risk and we can only hope that those with great ideas will persevere. To encourage innovation, society reduces some of the innovation risk through structures like funding systems, regulation, and of course...

Ideas are at the center of all of our inventive, creative, and commercial activities. Defining the contours of the law of ideas, however, has often proved to be an elusive endeavor. It is a body of law that exists just outside of the domain of traditional intellectual property law, yet it lies...

One of the underlying justifications of the patent system is to encourage dissemination of scientific knowledge and promote innovation. Yet, the patent system is not a green card to innovation. Indeed, given our progress in science and the increasing rate of technological developments it is...

The granting of patents is qualified by the assessment of whether the said invention is obvious or involved an inventive step, and has some utility. The obviousness inquiry, based on the Windsurfer test, is a factual and objective inquiry, but its evaluative nature inherently requires some...

Although patents are the prototypical type of protection that most people consider applicable to protecting drugs, patents are just the most-established and well-known method available to protect drugs from competition. However, there are other types of mechanisms in regulatory laws that provide...

This paper discusses how clerical errors made in documents relating to patents should be dealt with. It takes as its cue a recent case that overturned the Canadian Patent Office’s refusal to correct an error – a patent agent’s supply of the wrong serial number of a patent when remitting...

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, patentees created many novel and complex transactions to commercialize their property: they maximized their profits through sophisticated agreements that imposed restrictions on manufacturing, sales, and other uses of their inventions. When these...

Section 292 of the Patent Act forbids the false marking of unpatented or infringing articles with the type of marks usually used by patentees to provide public notice of their patented inventions. Prior to the recent enactment of patent reform, the statute provided a rare qui tam enforcement...