In 2011, Congress enacted the America Invents Act (AIA), the most substantial overhaul of the patent system in the past sixty years. The most significant change in the AIA was the move from a first to invent regime to a first inventor to file regime. The goal of the move to first to file,...

We don't want a "Mother, may I?" regulatory regime for innovation. A regulatory regime that requires permission to enter the market or develop a new product is a problem for innovation because it relies on the government, not the innovator, to decide the course of innovation. Giving private...

The Supreme Court's eBay decision requires district courts to weigh the equities before permanently enjoining a defendant. This is a good thing. Since eBay, the tactic of threatening injunctions to, in the Court's words, “extract exorbitant fees” has declined. It's now harder for a patent...

In reliance on Qualcomm's FRAND promises, key SSOs incorporated its technologies into wireless standards. Qualcomm takes the position that its patented technologies are essential to those standards and, therefore, that any firm making or selling a standard-compliant product infringes its...

The patent system seems in the midst of truly dramatic change. The last twenty years have seen the rise of a new business model – the patent troll – that grew to become a majority of all patent lawsuits. They have seen a significant expansion in the number of patents granted and a...

Can an appellate court alter substantive law without writing an opinion? We attempt to answer that question by conducting a novel empirical investigation into how the Federal Circuit has implemented the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, the most recent in a series of Supreme...

Patent law is crucial to encourage technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent...

We address an important issue the Supreme Court left unaddressed this spring in its blockbuster Google v. Oracle decision: are computer interfaces copyrightable at all? We argue that they aren’t, and that the Federal Circuit's decision to the contrary is an aberration that should not undermine...

Competitive job markets are critical to the success of the national economy, spurring innovation while boosting wages and labor equality. The moment is ripe for the new administration to foster competitive job markets by banning noncompete agreements (noncompetes). New empirical evidence shows...