This Comment evaluates the economic effects of the patent misuse doctrine. The patent misuse doctrine is an equitable remedy analogous to the “unclean hands” doctrine in tort law. It bars infringement suits by patentees who have “misused” their patent grant, either by using the patent to...

How can we allow patent examiners to effectively distinguish between patentable and unpatentable inventions, without slowing the process to a crawl or wasting a bunch of money? This essay reviews the recent literature and considers a number of proposals and their limitations. It concludes that...

The Supreme Court upended the patent world in the past decade with a series of decisions restricting the scope of patent-eligible subject matter. The culmination of those cases – Alice v. CLS Bank -- has been at the center of a firestorm of controversy in the five years since it was decided....

Rapid advances in digital and life sciences technology continue to spur the evolution of intellectual property law. As professors and practitioners in this field know all too well, Congress and the courts continue to develop intellectual property law and jurisprudence at a rapid pace. For that...

The Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit have repeatedly emphasized the public interest in testing the validity of patents, weeding out patents that should not have been issued. But there is one important group of people the law systematically prevents from challenging bad patents. Curiously,...

The Federal Circuit is ignoring a significant share of the words of patent claims. That's a bad idea as a matter of policy. It is virtually impossible to tell when the court is going to do it. And it's inconsistent with the idea that the claims define the scope of the invention, and with how the...

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and...