Patent law is generally considered the most territorial forms of intellectual property. The extension of infringement to include “offers to sell” inventions opened the door to potential extraterritorial expansion of U.S. patent law. In Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling, Inc. v. Maersk...

In the last twenty years, there have been considerable changes in United States patent law. Most of these changes have been somewhat top-down in nature, meaning that the impetus for the changes came from our international treaty obligations or from an interest in harmonizing our laws with those...

Patents represent a quid pro quo between the public and the inventor: in exchange for disclosing the invention, the inventor receives the right to exclude others from practicing her invention. They therefore serve as a source technical information. Patents also communicate information to markets...

Under the Federal Circuit's current law, the doctrine of equivalents protects only those technologies that arise after the patent issues. This state of affairs creates a curious paradox: the patentee is afforded protection for that which she did not possess, which runs counter to the general...

Many of the problems with modern patent-eligibility analysis can be traced back to a fundamental philosophical divide between judges who treat eligibility as the primary tool for effectuating patent policy and those who take patent-eligibility as nothing more than a coarse filter to be invoked...

The concept of possession in property law operates to allocate property rights among competing claimants by awarding the property to the first to take possession. Possession in this context requires an act that communicates to third parties that someone has exercised dominion over the item....

The digital revolution has now moved beyond music and video files. A person can now translate three-dimensional objects into digital files and, at the press of a button, recreate those items via a 3D printer or similar device. Just as digitization placed pressure on the copyright system, so will...

Patents are generally considered to be the most territorial of all the various forms of intellectual property. Even patent law, however, has confronted issues involving the application of a U.S. patent to extraterritorial activity. The Supreme Court has expressed an interest in both issues –...

This Article explores the potential impact the The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) could have on broader claim construction doctrine. It starts by offering an overview of claim construction in the courts and in the USPTO. It then considers the potential unintended consequence of a...