The United States is the only country in the world that awards patents to the first person to invent something, rather than the first to file a patent application. In order to determine who is first to invent, the United States has created an elaborate set of "interference" proceedings and legal...

A trade secret, according to the conventional understanding, “expires” only once it is no longer kept secret. Keep the secret for decades or even centuries, as with the formula for Coca-Cola, and you can potentially protect it forever. In this article, we argue that conventional wisdom is...

Neural network and machine learning artificial intelligences (AIs) need comprehensive data sets to train on. Those data sets will often be composed of images, videos, audio, or text. All those things are copyrighted. Copyright law thus stands as an enormous potential obstacle to training AIs....

This amicus brief supports the FTC's position in the 2d Circuit appeal of 1-800 Contacts v. FTC. The brief was joined by 29 intellectual property, Internet law, and antitrust professors.The case involves 1-800 Contacts' settlement agreements with its online competitors in which they agreed not...

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots and...

Trademark owners regularly overreach. They often threaten or sue people they have no business suing, including satirists, parodists, non-commercial users, and gripe sites. When they do, they often justify their aggressive legal conduct by pointing to the need to protect their trademarks by...

Patent law has tried to find a middle ground between a vision of invention as a mental act and a competing vision that focuses on the actual building of a working product. The definition of invention in the 1952 Patent Act incorporates both conception and reduction to practice, sometimes...

In a string of recent opinions, the Supreme Court has made it harder for consumers to avoid arbitration clauses, even when businesses strategically insert provisions in them that effectively prevent consumers from being able to bring any claim in any forum. In American Express Co. v. Italian...

A commonly offered justification for patent trolls or non-practicing entities (NPEs) is that they serve as a middleman, facilitating innovation and bringing new technology from inventors to those who can implement it. We survey those involved in patent licensing to see how often patent license...

For nearly forty years, since the Supreme Court decision in Illinois Brick, federal antitrust law has prevented indirect purchasers from complaining of overcharges caused by antitrust violations. The Court reasoned that direct purchasers are the best and most motivated antitrust plaintiffs. But...