Scholars and other commentators widely assert that enforcement of contractual and other limitations on labor mobility deters innovation. Based on this view, federal and state legislators have taken, and continue to consider, actions to limit the enforcement of covenants not-to-compete in...

In a widely reported article by Jeffrey Rosenfeld and Christopher Mason published in Genome Medicine, significant misstatements were made, because the authors did not sufficiently review the claims – which define the legal scope of a patent – in the patents they analyzed. Specifically, the...

This paper rejects the fundamental "private law" premise of patent law remedies that courts should always attempt to restore the status quo ante by making the patentee "whole" in the event of infringement. Instead, the patent system and its associated remedies should be viewed as part of a...

We the undersigned professors of law and economics offer this comment on the USPTO’s notice of proposed rulemaking to change how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board will construe patent claims in its administrative trial proceedings. As a group, our research explores a wide range of issues in...

Empirical studies of the use of trade secrecy are scant, and those focusing on startups, non-existent. In this paper, we present the first set of data — drawn from the Berkeley Patent Survey — on the use of trade secrets by U.S. startup companies in the software, biotechnology, medical...

Researchers studying the U.S. patent litigation system have typically had to rely on proprietary, commercial databases to retrieve comprehensive lists of litigated patents and associated case information, precluding publication of underlying data and the verification of study results. In other...

Many scholars have employed the term “entropy” in the context of law and legal systems to roughly refer to the amount of “uncertainty” present in a given law, doctrine, or legal system. Just a few of these scholars have attempted to formulate a quantitative definition of legal entropy,...

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. (iPatent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook...

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This chapter of the casebook...

Less than a handful of casebooks are truly open source, in the sense of being fully modifiable. Patent Law: An Open-Source Casebook is the first patent law casebook that provides adopting professors, students, and others the ability to fully modify its contents. This file includes the cover,...