This short essay reflects on developments in the law, scholarship, and practice of fair use since the publication in 2004 of an earlier article on patterns in fair use practice and adjudication. It synthesizes many of those developments in the idea of “Madisonian” fair use, borrowing the...

The Italian and European regulatory framework for patents would benefit from further improvements in order to foster dynamic competition between Italian firms. At the national level the exclusive allocation of the right to patent inventions to universities, rather than to researchers, would...

There is an ongoing debate over whether or not a trademark is “property,” and what the appropriate boundaries of such a property right might be. Some scholars assert that rules and justifications developed to handle rights in real property are generally a poor fit for intellectual property...

The technology transfer process between a public laboratory and a company has been the subject of many publications and has been widely discussed in economic theory. This paper highlights several newly identified asymmetries occurring between the different agents taking part in the process.The...

Digital designs – that is, designs for display on electronic screens – have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...

Based on conflicting Federal Circuit case law, many academics have written, and many practitioners likely believe, that claim meanings or their applications may expand over time for purposes of literal infringement. But this common wisdom is wrong. Under existing Federal Circuit rules, the first...

The knowledge commons framework, deployed here in a review of the early network of scientific communication known as the Republic of Letters, combines a historical sensibility regarding the character of scientific research and communications with a modern approach to analyzing institutions for...

The innovation impact of intellectual property compulsory licenses - government-imposed access without the authorization of the property owner - has generated great interest in the academic literature. Moreover, recent measures by the governments of Thailand and Brazil have generated increased...

Concerns have been raised that the upsurge of 3D printing technology would disrupt the patent system. The central question the present paper aims to address is whether and to what extent the emergence of 3D printing technology indeed urges us to rethink patent law. The paper splits up this...

U.S. intellectual property law is firmly rooted in utilitarian principles. Copyright law is viewed as a means to give proper monetary incentives to authors for their creative effort. Many European copyright systems pursue additional goals: Authors have the right to be named as author, to control...