This essay, written for the National Association of Environmental Law Societies' (NAELS) annual meeting, explains how patent law operates generally with an emphasis on how it may impact the environment in particular. In so doing, the essay addresses from a patent perspective some representative...

The ability to protect and safeguard cultural heritage is of vital importance to some communities. Without the ability to maintain control over these expressions, external subjects could freely appropriate them, which could negatively affect the community’s identity, spirituality, and general...

This working paper presents findings from analyses of Russian nanotechnology outputs in publications and patents focusing on developments over the period 1990 through to 2012. The investigation draws on bibliometric datasets of scientific journal publications and patents and on available...

This Article explores the practical consequences of an important shift that has recently taken place in patent theory. Although it was long agreed that the purpose of granting patents is to reward invention, today many scholars instead attempt to justify the patent system based on its role in...

Because it must rely on imperfect information, the patent system will inevitably make mistakes. To determine how the system ought to err in cases of uncertainty—and whether a given mistake is worth correcting—scholars have composed a simple picture of the consequences of error in either...

Christensen (1997) provided evidence for disruptions in the hard disk drive industry by examining the technological changes of disk drives. By building up the disruption model, Christensen argues that the failures of the established firms in the industry to respond to simple technological...

The Declaratory Judgment Act of 1934 was quickly tagged by the U.S. Supreme Court as a simple procedural measure. Whether simple or procedural, the addition of the declaratory judgment option has dramatically increased the rights of would-be defendants. This is of special interest in patent law,...

This Article addresses a problem that has attracted significant attention from patent scholars: the potential for patents on research tools - technological products and processes that are critical inputs of scientific experimentation - to inhibit basic scientific research. The Article first...

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...